Careers and the Business of Law

In this raw and energizing conversation of Careers and The Business of Law from the DHL Legal Innovation Summit, David Cowen sits down with Matthew Smith, Executive Vice President of Business Developmentat Array, to talk about building trust, managing high-performing teams, making the leap into legal from healthcare, and navigating the "middle of the middle" of a career. From the fear of hearing no to the power of shutting up and listening, this is required listening for anyone climbing the jungle gym of leadership.

What You'll Learn:

• How great leaders coach, not micromanage
• Why listening is the most powerful (and overlooked) sales move
• What it really means to lead in the "middle of the middle"
• How values, vision, and relationships shape the second half of a career

Like what you hear? 🎧 Subscribe. Share. Send to someone who needs a jolt of clarity. Because your career's not a ladder, it's a jungle gym. And the climb gets better when we do it together.

💡To learn more about the future of legal innovation, visit https://cowengroup.com/ Never eat alone!

Live from the DHL Legal Innovation Summit in Columbus, David Cowen sits down with Christina Wojcik, Head of Innovation & Partnerships at Pearson Ferdinand, for a high-energy conversation on the future of legal services. Christina breaks down what it means to build a truly tech-first law firm, no associates, no legacy systems, just streamlined, partner-led innovation. From back-office automation to smarter pricing models, this episode explores how law firms can operate leaner, move faster, and deliver more value in a rapidly evolving market.

Key Takeaways:

• Tech-first law firms are rethinking structure, no associates, just distributed, empowered partners
• Automating admin tasks frees up time, margin, and talent for high-value client work
• Clients want to partner on innovation, not just hear about it
• We're in the messy middle of transformation, and the opportunity is wide open

🎧 Tune in, share with your team, and subscribe for more conversations that move legal from now to next.

Because careers aren't ladders, they're jungle gyms.

💡To learn more about the future of legal innovation, visit https://cowengroup.com/ Never eat alone!

In this episode of Careers and the Business of Law: The Legal Data Intelligence Series, David Cowen sits down with Richard Pachella, Strategic Alliance Advisor at Epiq, to unpack the seismic shifts happening across legal tech, operations, and talent.

If you're in eDiscovery, legal operations, or just trying to navigate your career in the age of AI, this episode is for you.

🔥 What you'll hear:

• Why the smartest legal pros are leaning into AI now, not later
• How the lines between litigation support, M&A, regulatory, and compliance are blurring fast
• What today's legal departments need: prompt engineers, strategic consultants, and legal technologists who think beyond the silo
• How LDI is transforming from a "think tank" to a "build tank"
• Practical ways to adopt GenAI tools in your day-to-day, starting today

📣 Plus: Rich drops a 60-second insider take on what Epiq is hiring for, and why diverse backgrounds are more valuable than ever.

🎧 If you're serious about staying relevant, expanding your skills, and thinking out loud with the best in the business, press play!

💡To learn more about the future of legal innovation, visit https://cowengroup.com/ Never eat alone!

20 Years. 5 Pivots. 1 Big Bet on GenAI. 🎧 Featuring: Danny Thankachan | Head of Partnerships, CaseGuild

This isn't your average industry chat. This is a high-voltage, real-talk conversation between two longtime insiders, David Cowen and Danny Thankachan on what really matters now in legal innovation, GenAI, and career growth.

📌 Highlights:

• The evolution of eDiscovery from 2004 to today
• Why Legal Data Intelligence (LDI) is more than a buzzword, it's a framework for future-ready work
• Case Guild's bold mission to reinvent internal investigations
• What career reinvention really looks like in the AI age
• And why your job might be disrupted but your career doesn't have to be

🎧 Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Share this episode and take your career from now to next!

💡To learn more about the future of legal innovation, visit https://cowengroup.com/ Never eat alone!

Let's get something straight: the job of General Counsel has left the building. Today's GCs aren't just legal advisors, they're business architects, transformation leaders, and culture drivers. And if your legal team is still playing defense, you're losing ground. In this episode, Lisa Mather and Tim Fraser, two of the most forward-leaning legal execs in the game, pull back the curtain on how they're redefining the GC role from the center of the business.

What you'll walk away with:

• Why Legal Ops is outgrowing its old box and becoming strategic leadership.
• How the best GCs are operating at "120%" by speaking the language of margin, growth, and product.
• The mindset shift from "risk management" to "value creation" and what that means for your next hire.

🎯 Bonus: Both Lisa and Tim will be live at the SOLID AI Agentic BootCamp at Microsoft this August and onstage at SOLID New York in September. Want to meet the First 50? Be there. Register here! This isn't incremental change. It's an entirely new operating model. Hit play. Share with your team. And start thinking out loud, together.

In this no-BS roundtable, David Cowen sits down with Kevin Cohn - Chief Customer Officer at Brightflag; Tyler Finn, Head of Community & Growth at SpotDraft; and Matthew Wheatley, VP, Client Strategy at Priori to unpack the real state of legal operations, talent, and transformation.

Forget the panel buzzwords. This episode pulls back the curtain on what's actually happening inside high-performing legal teams. What's inside:

• Legal ops has hit a plateau, but careers haven't. The smartest players are skipping the next rung and stepping into legal strategy, transformation, and C-suite alignment.

• There's no ladder, just a jungle gym. From executive assistants to legal COOs, this episode is a playbook for navigating ambiguity and turning it into an advantage.

• The real skill gap? It's not tech. It's knowing your value. Are you a builder, a manager, or a creator? Know your lane, then double down.

This is the episode you forward to your team with one line: "This is the conversation legal ops needs to hear right now."

🎧 Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Share this episode and take your career from now to next!

💡To learn more about the future of legal innovation, visit https://cowengroup.com/ Never eat alone!

Headed to CLOC? So are E.J. Bastien and David Cowen and this episode is your field guide. Before you start speed-walking the ARIA hallways and hunting for coffee and co-pilots, listen in. E.J. Bastien has spent two decades at Microsoft reimagining what in-house eDiscovery and litigation support can be. He's leading teams, building AI agents, and solving tomorrow's problems with tools that most legal teams haven't even touched yet.

In this pre-CLOC masterclass, we dig into:

• How Microsoft is using GenAI to streamline review, code documents, and surface case-critical facts before a human ever sees them
• What it really means to build a bespoke agent trained on your legal team's workflows not ChatGPT, but your playbook
• Why perfectionists are out, and "learn-it-alls" are in and how that mindset shift is the secret to surviving (and thriving) in 2025.

You'll also hear what it takes to lead with confidence, experiment without fear, and stay grounded in the face of constant change.

It's Vegas. It's CLOC. It's time to stop chasing answers and start trading playbooks.

🎧 Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Share this episode and take your career from now to next!

💡To learn more about the future of legal innovation, visit https://cowengroup.com/ Never eat alone!

Guest: Kevin Cohn, Chief Customer Officer, Brightflag Host: David Cowen, President, The Cowen Group

🎙 This episode of Careers in the Business of Law (CBL) is a masterclass in motion.

Pre-live from the frontlines of CLOC, Kevin Cohn—Chief Customer Officer at Brightflag—joins David Cowen for a candid, strategic breakdown of how legal ops careers are being redefined in real time.

It's not just theory. Kevin unpacks the real ROI of relationship-driven events, the anatomy of modern go-to-market strategy, and the emergence of legal ops as a strategic powerhouse inside the legal department.

🔑 Six Big Ideas from the Conversation

1. Community-first is the new go-to-market. Bright Flag doesn't lead with features—they lead with helping. Their playbook is about solving legal ops problems, not pitching products.

2. Events like CLOC drive Origination, Advancement, and Nurturing. Think beyond booth traffic. Kevin outlines how events create momentum across the business development lifecycle—and why deep trust matters most.

3. Legal ops roles are moving up the strategy stack. Titles like Chief Legal Data Officer and Legal Chief Strategy Officer mark a shift from execution to foresight. Legal ops is no longer the backstage crew—it's co-authoring the future.

4. The champion persona is your north star. Champions are the change agents inside legal departments. They may not control the budget, but they drive the decision.

5. First-time CLOC attendee? Come with a plan. Ask questions. Introduce yourself. Set daily KPIs for connection. And before the rooftop parties blur your memory, write those names down.

6. Legal ops is leading the AI era. While GCs are pulled into geopolitical and enterprise-wide risk, legal ops is best positioned to own digitization, AI integration, and operational change.

Viva Las Vegas. Let's move from now to next.

What happens when a GC thinks like a CEO, rolls up his sleeves like a contractor, and leads like a startup founder? You get Mark Smolik, Chief Legal Officer of DHL Supply Chain, and a masterclass in legal leadership you can't afford to miss. This episode is a front-row seat to how Mark turned blue-collar grit, data discipline, and a sharp eye for ROI into a legal department that runs like a high-performance business unit. We unpack:

• His $37,000-a-claim insight that reshaped risk management.
• A bold AI deployment that eliminates human review in M&A due diligence.
• And the why behind DHL's Legal Innovation Summit, June 3–4 in Columbus, where his full team will share the playbook.

If you're wondering how to go from ideas to impact or how to just start, this is the episode. One of the best conversations we've had.

🎧 Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Share this episode and take your career from now to next!

💡To learn more about the future of legal innovation, visit https://cowengroup.com/ Never eat alone!

We're not in Kansas anymore. We're in the Jetsons Era.

Legal Data Intelligence isn't just tech, it's talent, timing, and the ability to see around corners.

In this episode, I sat down with Stacy Lettie, Chief of Staff to the General Counsel at Organon, and we went from Disney to data to dogs with AI collars. Yes, really.

We talked:

• Why the future of legal starts with foundations (Small World → Tron)
• What makes a great Chief of Staff
• When imposter syndrome disappears (spoiler: when you earn it)
• And the moment we decided—live, in-person—to build AI agents at Microsoft this July

🧠 Stacy brings the brains and heart. She's a walking masterclass in Legal Ops > Strategy > LDI leadership. Shoutout to the OGs of LDI—John Koss, Omar Haroun, Adam Rouse, Bobby Malhotra, Scott Milner, Farrah Pepper, Geoffrey Vance, and Julia Hasenzahl. And to Jim Collins for the rocket fuel: If someone offers you a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask which seat, just get on.

🎧 Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Share this episode and take your career from now to next!

💡To learn more about the future of legal innovation, visit https://cowengroup.com/ Never eat alone!