The Modern Lawyer

Today’s episode is with Mary O’Carroll, the Chief Community Officer at Ironclad, a contract lifecycle management company. Mary comes from a consulting, business, and finance background and through her career at Orrick, Google, Ironclad, has become one of the faces of “legal operations.” It doesn’t hurt that she was a founding board member of CLOC, the corporate legal operations consortium.

In this episode we talk about Mary’s start at Orrick, working with leaders like Ralph Baxter and Peter Krakauer, to Google, where she built the legal operations team from scratch. She talks about how she put in place process, procedures, and systems to ensure that Google could run a vast portfolio of cases effectively and efficiently, all while they were playing a part in inventing what we now may refer to as “internet law.”

Finally we talk about Mary’s big move to Ironclad. Why did she make this move, and what is she hoping to achieve there? What is Ironclad’s vision for growth in the contract lifecycle space?

Today’s episode is with Varun Mehta, the CEO of Factor, a legal managed services company recently spun out of Axiom, the massive alternative legal services provider. Varun’s story is fascinating. He approaches the legal industry from the perspective of an engineer out to solve problems in a cross-disciplinary way, totally free from the traditional, and frequently ineffective, old ways of performing legal services for clients.

Varun starts by telling the story of a formative experience earlier in his career where he was able to assemble a team of subject matter experts and data scientists and beat a Global 100 firm in a race to find highly relevant documents relating to a key financial investigation. If his team could out-compete teams of expensive attorneys at finding needles in data haystacks, how else could a cross-functional team raise the bar for legal service?

Varun also talks about discovering his personal strengths, inspiration through Stoic philosophy, his idea of professional compound interest, and how he finally made it to the helm of one of the most interesting companies in the legal industry.

Keep an eye on companies like Factor. As the legal industry approaches client service in new and creative ways over the next decade, Factor is likely to carve out a niche as a key player in the space, in an effort to, as Varun says, bring the human back to legal.

As always, if you like our discussion, please rate us on Apple podcasts. We hope you enjoy the conversation.

Today’s episode is with Joey Seeber, the CEO of Level Legal, a Dallas-based, next generation law company that bills itself as “problem solvers” for the legal industry. From e-discovery, to investigations, to regulatory matters, Level Legal takes on many tasks that can’t be done effectively or efficiently at law firms.

In this episode, Joey talks about building a company in the depths of the Great Recession, large early clients opting to use Level Legal over traditional law firms, and all of the cultural and efficiency-based decisions he and his partners made in the early days. I think you’ll find Level Legal intriguing because it represents a different, arguably better way to do certain types of legal work. Joey is an experienced attorney who realized that he could do certain legal work more “efficiently, and more cost effectively” than the incumbent players. Could business like Level Legal represent the diversified future of how legal work is completed in the United States?

As always, if you like our discussion, please rate us on Apple podcasts. We hope you enjoy the conversation.

Anyone reading news about legal technology recently has seen the massive surge in big money deals across the industry. Over the last several months, the industry has seen blockbuster fundraises and M&A activity despite the pandemic. Just last month, contract management startup Ironclad raised over 100M. Around the same time, e-discovery company Disco, raised roughly the same amount. Weeks ago, Reveal Data raised 200M, spurring the acquisition of leading AI-backed data analytics platform Brainspace.

In today’s episode, we’re joined by Wendell Jisa, the CEO of Reveal Data. I ask him about his entrepreneurial journey, exactly how a 200M megadeal actually happens, and why legal technology is finally attracting these massive investments. Wendell’s story and vision in this space is remarkable. His transparency and honesty in explaining his view of the industry, how he’s grown his business, and how this massive deal came to life are impressive.

As always, if you like our discussion, please rate us on Apple podcasts. We hope you enjoy the conversation.

Happy New Year, Modern Lawyer Podcast listeners. Today’s episode addresses one of the fastest moving, most fascinating areas in the law today: blockchain and cryptocurrency. We’re joined by Joon Kim, a former Kirkland & Ellis attorney and AGC at Goldman Sachs, who is now the general counsel at blockchain startup o1 Labs, based out of San Francisco.

This episode explores three key things: one: a basic primer on what attorneys need to know now regarding cryptocurrency, two: what technological developments in smart contracts and transactions could replace rote, low level, and inefficient legal work, and three, a survey of major recent breakthroughs in the cryptocurrency world, including DeFi or decentralized finance, and CBDCs or Central Bank Digital Currencies. This is some mind-blowing stuff, and some amazing technology, which may be less than a decade away from rapidly re-structuring how the legal industry operates.

As always, if you like our discussion, please rate us on Apple podcasts. We hope you enjoy the conversation.

Today’s episode is the third and final episode in a three part series on how the law firm business model will change in response to economic, competitive, and cultural trends. Our guest today is Patrick DiDomenico, the Chief Innovation Officer at leading employment law firm Jackson Lewis. Patrick literally wrote the book on KM in legal, appropriately titled Knowledge Management for Lawyers.

In this episode, we talk about whether law firms are at a structural disadvantage to adapt to the legal needs of the future, the consequences of large clients keeping legal work within their in-house departments instead of hiring law firms, and the deep conflict inherent in the billable hour. Patrick also talks about his idea of what could be a “complete disruptor” of the legal industry. One example, assuming a future of non-lawyer law firm ownership, could be a sprawling, national, franchised law company backed by private equity or a group of deep pocketed investors.

As always, if you like our discussion, please rate us on Apple podcasts. We hope you enjoy the conversation.

Today’s episode is the second in a three part series on the law firm business model and how COVID-19, the recession, and rising competition will cause law firms to rapidly change. Our guest today is Toby Brown, the Chief Practice Management Officer of AmLaw 50 law firm Perkins Coie. As a veteran of pricing, efficiency, and value in the law firm context, Toby provides a crucial perspective on where law firms are headed.

In our discussion, Toby talks about building close relationships with clients even while having very direct conversations about pricing, the role of the pricing function in biglaw, his new organization Legal Value Network, and how Perkins Coie won an increasing share of a major client’s business by demonstrating an 18% savings per transactional matter. Toby also talks about his firm’s Client Advantage program that works with clients to create operational and knowledge management efficiencies within their legal organization and to avoid what he refers to as “steaming piles of KM.

Today's episode is the first in a three part series on the law firm business model, and how COVID-19 the recession and rising competition will cause it to rapidly change. Our guest today is someone who is uniquely qualified to talk about this subject. Meredith Williams range is the Chief Knowledge and client value officer at the preeminent law firm Sherman and Sterling. Her portfolio of functions at the firm is impressive. Her role spans technology, knowledge management, pricing, in generally ensuring that each representation the firm takes on is a win win for the client, and for the firm. In this episode, we talk about how Meredith got her start on the business side of law firms.

Today’s episode is with Eva Shang, CEO of Legalist, a tech-enabled litigation finance firm with 150 million dollars of assets under management. Legalist uses tech and sophisticated analytics to source and underwrite legal investments, mainly for small and medium size claims.

In this episode, Eva talks about her entrepreneurial background as a Harvard dropout, first-time founder, and now a leader in a fascinating niche in the legal industry. We discuss the nuts and bolts of how litigation funding works, its sticky ethical questions, and its implications.

Additionally, and in one of my favorite tangents so far on the podcasts, Eva I discuss how today’s lawyers in many ways resemble the grain millers of hundreds of years ago. To quote Eva: “In our current society, power has moved from those who process material goods, to those who process the contracts that govern them.”

If you like our discussion, rate us on Apple podcasts. Thanks for listening.

Today’s episode is with Ajay Agrawal, the co-founder of UnitedLex, one of the earliest global alternative legal services providers. He’s now the CEO of SirionLabs, a high tech contract management tool aimed at large companies.

This episode is long. It’s long because when I tried to find less valuable content to cut, I completely failed.

This is because Ajay is a fascinating, articulate business leader with unique perspectives on the legal industry. He got his start practicing law at Simpson Thacher in New York and later was a part of Jones Day’s expansion into India in the 90s and early 2000s. There, in India, he got a ringside view of a major global trend: outsourcing; in this case, outsourcing medium to high-sophistication legal work to indian attorneys.

In this episode, Ajay does a great job of explaining complex business pain points and solutions. Additionally, his re-telling of specific moments in his entrepreneurial journey showcases critical moments where his ability to listen to clients, ask the right questions, and hustle, gave rise to high impact opportunities for Ajay and his company.

If you like what you hear, rate us on Apple podcasts! Enjoy the episode.