Hey, podcast listeners. I’m Robyn Addis, chief operating officer and chief marketing and business development officer at LISI. And I’m your host for this episode of LISI’s All the Things Podcast. On this week’s episode, One More Thing, I chat with Patrick Fuller, Vice President and General Manager at ALM Intelligence. Patrick and I are not just legal industry data geeks, we’re also great friends who love to get super nerdy about basically any topic we discuss. Today’s chat centers around our recent panel at ALM’s Legalweek titled, “Emerging Global Legal Markets.” And as we tend to do, we go down the rabbit hole of what an emerging legal market actually is. And how technology and the metaverse come into play as we look to the future of the profession and the future of the modern workplace coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic. So, here is, one more thing, this week’s episode of LISI’s All the Things podcast. Enjoy.

Robyn:

Hey, Patrick, I’m so glad to have you with us today on the LISI podcast, All the Things, and our special podcast, exclusive episode, One More Thing. Where today we’re going to talk about our recent presentation at ALM’s Legalweek 2022, where we talked about emerging and evolving global legal markets. Really quickly before I hand it over to you to sort of talk about what Legalweek is. For those of our audience who might not know that, I want to give a quick shout-out to our co-speakers. We had Richard Tromans, founder and consultant of Richard Tromans Consulting. Trish Lilley, who’s the Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer at Stroock & Stroock & Lavan. Lisa Shuchman, Executive Editor at Law.com International and for ALM, and Daniel Masopust, who is an analyst with ALM. And our fearless leader, you Patrick Fuller. Can you just introduce yourself a little bit for our audience and then yeah, tell us a little bit about what Legalweek is for anybody who might not know.

Patrick:

Sure. Well, first of all, it’s great to be here and I appreciate the invite as always, because as you well know, I’ve never met a microphone or a webcast that I don’t like. So this is perfect. My name is Patrick Fuller. I’m the Vice President and General Manager of ALM Intelligence. And Dan Masopust is actually an analyst in the intelligence team and is an emerging rock star in that phase. And Richard Tromans by the way, is better known as Artificial Lawyer. And so for a lot of people, he publishes what I consider to be one of the go-to sources for, especially in the UK, in global markets, his Artificial Lawyer blog is tremendous and Richard is a former journalist too. And he does consulting as you mentioned. And so it’s a really great mix of insight knowledge, but also some analysis and is what we’re going to talk about, and you and I talk about offline all the time.

The pace of change with technology is just … I mean, it continues to be at a breakneck pace, right? And the pandemic really accelerated that. And firms found out, “Oh, this stuff actually does work, and we can scale certain types of operations and we could be more effective.” Legalweek. It used to be legal tech. I think there’s a lot of people that still, Freudian slip, that with legal tech, but ALM acquired Legal Week, the publication in the UK several years ago. And the idea of bringing Legalweek here is really sort of the official kickoff for the calendar year, the fiscal year, the fiscal calendar year for the business of law. Because we bring into it not only the technology components of it, but also the financial and business of law. Gina Passarella runs the business of law conference as a part of that. We are bringing in, this was the first year that we did entire track around the convergence of professional services providers in the legal market.

We bring a lot of things around knowledge management, a lot of sessions around knowledge management, around diversity, D.E.I. initiatives as well. And so we try to make it as well-rounded to the various operational and financial roles inside law firms and legal departments as we possibly can.

Robyn:

Got it. So this was my first time, my first foray in Legalweek, and I’m not going to lie, especially coming into this conference straight out of the pandemic I had no idea what to expect. But holy cow, everybody was so excited to be there and was raving about the content, not just our panel, of course. But the content overall was just really timely and very valuable to all of the attendees there. And you ended up having three or 4,000 people actually attend. Did I hear that number from someone?

Patrick:

Little over five, and a little over five, usually there’s around 10. And so we knew that there was going to be a stair step period coming back. Because there’s a lot of firms and a lot of organizations, vendors, we saw this with LMA too when we were there. Budgets weren’t all the way back. And there was still uncertainty when budgets were being set last year. So we know that there’s going to be a stair step for a lot of these programs as they come back. And I was really encouraged with the turnout. I think the team Massey and Jen attorney that run, that do the programming for Legalweek and Abigail Morrow who runs all the marketing for it. I thought that they did just one hell of a job. They do a great job in going to the market and asking people, “What is it you want to talk about? What should we be talking about? What should we be covering? What are the issues that are going to be the most provocative?”

And Mark Fried is our head of events and our CFO as well. And he’s got a strong background in this and the team works really, really well. They work very closely with Gina Passarella and Heather Nevit and their teams on the editorial side. And in recent years they’ve somehow, we’ve tricked him into working a little bit more with the intelligence team. I think it’s just because we buy them drinks, but they’ve been exceptionally good to us and they have an advisory board and I get to sit in on the advisory board calls. And it’s made up of a variety of people from the market. And those calls are really interesting because you get 12 to 15 people, and these are luminaries. Everybody from judges to COOs, to managing partners to general counsel, and they’ll tell you, they don’t pull punches around what they want to hear and who would be a good keynote who would not be a good keynote.

And I think that process is what produces a really, really good conference. And I think that they’ve done a great in recent years of pulling together some really interesting content.

Robyn:

Yeah, no, it was a very interesting agenda and I was excited to be able to attend and to have been invited to speak by you, my good friend. So I’m just going to use this opportunity to tell everybody that Patrick and I are super nerds, and we’re super nerds together. We like to get together and just talk about the nerdiest things. So I don’t even have an agenda of questions that I’ve prepared or given to Patrick in advance of this conversation. Because I knew that I basically just had to give us a topic and we’d be fine probably for at least 30 minutes. So buckle up and join us for the ride. So, Patrick, talking about interesting and provocative content, our panel was emerging and evolving global legal markets and our panelists I listed before we had just such an awesome organic conversation about domestically and international what defines a global legal market or a legal market, or I should say a market that was ripe for legal to move into.

And we can talk about that for a second, but I especially want to focus on the thing that you and I get super nerdy about, which is, the tech of it all. And is the metaverse, is technology the emerging legal market that we should all be paying attention to? So just to set the stage, if you would not mind recapping for any listeners what we defined as an emerging legal market?

Patrick:

Yeah, that was really a fascinating part of the conversation because everybody has different ideas around it. I mean, I think what we all agreed upon is that A, it was one that wasn’t heavily penetrated, and I’ve created something that will be, I used in the past and it’ll be coming out in some of our products very shortly, called a market saturation rate and an index. And it’s one of these markets where you still have a low percentage of outside firms that have come in. There’s not been significant upheaval in terms of lateral movement and going from firm A to firm B, especially to the non-headquartered firms.

And then I tend to look at a lot of things related to the business side. And there’s a couple of ways of looking at it. I know Trish or Lisa mentioned, or you may have mentioned this as well too around the volume of work. So a couple years ago, Philadelphia, for example was, the Eastern district to Pennsylvania was the hub for asbestos and asbestosis and mesothelioma. I only know those from all the commercials that air at 3:00 AM, but all those types of matters in the Eastern district. And you saw firms, litigation firms then moving in and putting an office in there, because they were in trial there on such a regular basis it made sense. They had a lot of validity in that market and they capitalized on it.

I think we tend to look a lot at where the money is, because the legal work is going to follow. I mean, there’s so much follow-up work from everything that’s going on. So where is there a lot of M&A activity, where is there a lot of venture capital funding? And what is it about those markets that is going to facilitate the business side enough that it’s going to facilitate legal work as a result of it? Because when you think about it, there’s a lot of work that could be done virtually now. And we found that out during the pandemic and as we talk about, but if you start thinking about, “Okay, all these different companies, if you’re a startup or you’re a mature company, what are your legal needs? And where’s the commonality.” It’s like, well, everybody’s going to have formation-related issues and contracts and they’re going to have IP-related issues and tax.

And if they’re not virtual, they’re going to have some real estate and they’re going to have some regulatory and compliance and you kind of, labor and employment definitely. So you start kind of going down the line, you think, “Okay, if there’s a lot of venture capital money that’s flowing into ABC market and there are companies that are then coming into there, and it’s underserved by outside counsel law firms. If you are a mid-market mid-size firm, even if you’re in the back half of the 100 or in the second 100, you don’t want to wait for the big firms to go into these markets and drive up all the costs.” That’s kind of, we’ve seen that happen in a variety of other markets.

Austin’s a great example of that. Salt Lake City now is starting to see some more of that, even though it’s been fairly well established for 20 years. Nashville, we were talking about before we started recording. Nashville is a market that’s seeing a lot of larger firms move into it and everything else. So you want to get in there before some of these large firms come in and really blow it up. And one that we talked a lot about in particular was Raleigh, which it’s still sort of mystifying to me being the research triangle with three major universities, two of which are playing each other this weekend, we’re recording this before the final four. And everybody’s like, “Yeah, who cares? They play each other all the time with Duke and North Carolina.”

But you’ve got those two schools in NC State that are right there in the research triangle. Now you’ve got Apple and Google that are putting campuses in there and doing more development work. And you’ve got a market that is the number eight ranked city in the world by various data source as a science city and biotech. And you’ve got Boston that is a biotech capital. And you’ve got these markets that have niche sort of offerings.

And then you look at, “Okay, why are there not more law firms here?” And for some of these firms, this is, now’s the time to strike. And you want to get there before you’re overpaying for talent that has been picked over by all the big firms too. And that’s not just lawyers, but it’s also, as you and I talked about, it’s also the professional staff as well.

Robyn:

Yeah. Well, and I want to go back to something you said before I forget it. So it’s interesting to me, we’re talking about where the VC money is. On the service provider side I am really fascinated by the number of firms that are coming to us, to us being LISI, to investigate options for digital marketing services. And those firms specifically with a specialization in small businesses startups, EC, VC, all that kind of stuff. And it is, yeah, I would say within the past six months, it is exponentially more firms than it was this time last year. And I’ve only been outside of law firm, outside the four walls of a single law firm for about three years at this point.

But if in that three-year period, the past several weeks and months have been exponentially higher than any other time, it’s an interesting trend. I don’t have any scientific data to sort of back this up, but it’s an interesting trend for me. And it tells me that from a business perspective, coming out of the pandemic or whatever the other causes leading to that are. That people and businesses are moving to that sort of formation stage, second business, third company, whatever, and sort of moving into that formation cycle. Which is interesting to me specifically, because, and I’m getting to my point, I promise. And it’s specifically because people are not necessarily centralized in the big markets anymore. People coming out of the pandemic, if we’re coming out of the pandemic, I guess learned that they could sort of do business from anywhere. So these boutique firms that are narrowing their focus and specialty onto the founding and supporting of startups are located in places that are far removed from some of these areas that you’re even talking about. You know what I mean?

Patrick:

Well, we can go back though to 2007 for this. And this is, I mean, this is a great example of the leg time between the business community and the legal community. When Apple decided that they were going to, they started filing patents in what, 2005, 2006, and everybody sort of had an idea that the iPhone was coming and that there would be an app for that. Before that it was software. For those of you that are young and eliciting to this. We actually used to go to stores like CompUSA and Best Buy, and we would buy little CDs and we would come and we would install it, because our computers had a CD and a DVD drive, which was great. Because we used to just burn all sorts of music onto those and have great mixed CDs. But-

Robyn:

For the record, I still remember that time. You always accuse me of not, but I remember it.

Patrick:

I still have stacks of, hundreds of blank CDs and stuff like that, that I just … They’re going to get preserved for posterity purposes. But pre-iPhone, you had to be in Redwood City or in Silicon Valley or in Redmond, Washington, you had to be in these places. And all of a sudden you could be sitting in your garage, or in your dorm room in Madison, Wisconsin, or in Ann Arbor or Nashville or wherever it is, and developing applications and you’re getting them to market. And oh, by the way, they don’t have to be 49.99 or 69.99. Now you’re selling these little discrete things for 1.99 or 2.99. And we’ve seen that evolution on the app store as well. Now you’re getting into some of these things where it’s subscription revenue and it’s $40 a year for this.

But we’re not calling it software anymore, we’re calling it apps. We’re literally referring to it as apps now. And so the business community, and especially the computer industry, the technology industry realized very quickly that it was, that decentralized everything. And it gave rise to the fact now that you started to see venture capital money going into startups, especially technology startups that were in markets other than Silicon Valley or Washington. And here’s case in point. Which is last year was a record year for VC funding. And in the U.S. a 105 billion, I kind of know this off the top of my head for reasons that are depressing and sad, yet sociable. But there’s a $105 billion that was of funding rounds that went into Silicon Valley-based companies. The next closest one was New York at 55 and then Boston at 32. And most of the Boston stuff at 32 billion was in the life sciences and biotech space.

But New York now, for every $2 that’s going to Silicon Valley-based companies, New York is getting a dollar of it. So you’re already starting to see New York get into some of that as well. What’s interesting on that is in the top three, it wasn’t Austin, and it was in Salt Lake City, which are, sort of the darlings of a lot of that right now. And you have Miami that has openly saying that they want to become the Silicon Valley of the Southeast. Atlanta has said the same thing. And so a lot of these cities right now, the municipalities, they are seeing the opportunity that exists in bringing technology and startups and building a startup economy in their markets.

And Michigan’s a great example of that too. 15 years ago, 10, 15 years ago there’s a lot of firms that were not going to Detroit anymore. There was, we could buy really nice houses in Detroit, cheaper than I could buy them in Oklahoma, which is saying something. And the State of Michigan started putting all sorts of tax incentives in there for technology and software development and innovation. And now suddenly that’s a thriving location for a lot of sort of under the radar venture capital funding, which means that for law firms Detroit should be a pretty interesting destination for you, because it’s lower barrier to entry. You have a lot of cross border work going across the Ambassador Bridge into Canada. There is a lot of opportunity in some of these places that are really just off the radar of a lot of firms right now.

Robyn:

Okay. So I’m going to take that and use it, your last sentence and use it as a segue into what I really want to get nerdy about, which is basically the metaverse and all that that entails. But specifically the concept of what the metaverse or technology, leveraging new technologies could mean for law firms and providers of legal services. And so last week, my last week, whenever you’re listening to this, it was the 21st, 22nd of March. I was at the LMA Conference in Las Vegas and Richard and Daniel Susskind were there. And they were talking about the future of professions, which Patrick, I know you’ve heard them speak on this topic before, but the one thing they said that super struck me and has had me thinking since then was Richard Susskind saying, “The competition that kills you doesn’t look like you.” The competition of the future might be based in a paradigm that doesn’t even exist today.

And so when I think about … I have all these ideas, I wouldn’t know the first thing about how to execute them, but when I think about the law firm of the future existing without borders necessarily, or in the metaverse, I think that to me, that strikes me as the emerging global market. And it was pointed out. Lisa did a good job of pointing this out saying, “There are firms that do cross border work that don’t have a single lawyer located in a specific locality.” I guess what I wonder is, what does that mean in terms of the entire operation of a law firm. If it’s completely distributed, if it’s completely virtual, how can we better serve clients? How can law firms better serve clients or provide new and different services because of a newly imagined service model?

Patrick:

I think it’s a really good question, because there is continuing evidence that the … Just as we were talking about before about opening in certain markets and things like that to counterbalance that. There is mounting evidence of, if you’re going to do that, you need to have a lot of attorneys in those offices. You got to commit to them, what you don’t want to do is have a lot of offices and have all the real estate that are then poorly staffed.

Robyn:

Yeah.

Patrick:

And we’ve seen that with some firms, and we won’t get into names on this or anything, but we’ve seen that with some firms that have opened up in 25, 30, 40 different locations, but they only have five, six, seven lawyers in each of those offices. And consequently, you look at their margins and their margins aren’t great.

And that means that they have very little margin for error on top of that as well. I think the metaverse is really interesting. I think that there’s the historical version of it, which I think a lot of people associate with games like Second Life. There’s the reality of it now where it is sort of a 3D dimensional, or a three-dimensional sort of existence that you can do. And the work that you guys did with Stroock for example, and that virtual, that metaverse that you created for them was just stunningly phenomenal. And-

Robyn:

Oh, thank you.

Patrick:

I agree a 100% with Susskind’s point, by the way. Because when you look at the great disruptors. Walmart and Best Buy and really any big box retailer, they weren’t disrupted by another big box retailer. When you look at Blockbuster and Hollywood Video, I mean, first of all, let’s be honest. The whole charging me for not rewinding it and everything else. I mean, and the late fees, they kind of self-inflicted some of that. But it’s streaming and everything else. And my wife and I were actually talking about this the other night, there was a movie that was coming out and we were like, “Yeah, it’ll be on HBO Max.” I think it is already. And it’s like there’s something about going and seeing that type of film in the theater.

And the experience is different then anything else, but you know what, pretty soon we adapt. We absolutely adapt. I think the only thing that’s really interesting, I think the Susskind’s comparison’s really interesting. I think the only thing that is along those same lines is Kodak and Kodak Eastman and cameras. Because cameras largely have not changed. They’ve just where they are and the quality of them is what’s changed. You’re no longer carrying that thing around your neck, it’s now in your phone. But Amazon shattered the retail business, streaming Netflix and Hulu and Apple TV. I mean, Apple TV is the thing that’s going to end up burying things like Direct TV. And in a weird sort of thing, in a weird world, this is what’s so funny about this, by the way, is cable TV’s going to go bye-bye.

Because everybody is cord cutting, but yet they’re not cord cutting because they’re streaming and you’re still paying the cable company, regardless. So it’s like if I’m running, Cox, which is what I have here, where I live or Comcast or any of those, I’m like, “Fine. I don’t want to pay the carriage fees.” ESPN is great and everything, although I haven’t watched SportsCenter, and I can’t tell you how many years, because I get everything on demand right now. And so, why do I want to pay the carriage fees for that when people can just, I want to get more money from them by putting data caps and then forcing people to go with unlimited streaming, unlimited usage plans. And I’ll get more per month off of the internet then I will off of carriage fees and regular cable TV and set top boxes and that sort of thing.

So I think that there’s always going to be that level of adaptation. And here’s where I’m bringing it all back, by the way. You talk about the plane ride to land your question, the plane ride to land the answer to the question is equally as long. And in fact, I think there’s been two connections on this flight so far. But here’s the thing. We ran a stat at Legalweek in the state of the industry presentation that James Willer initially surfaced, who’s our director of legal ops, and he’s British. And you know that by the way he sounds when he talks and he sounds so much more intelligent because of his British accent.

But, our team, the analysts, one of the things that they do is they go through every firm in the AMLO 200, all the global 100 firms that are not in the 200, UK 50, and now they’re going to be doing it with mid-size firms this year. And they do these reports, 18 to 20 page long reports on every single firm. Comparing them to their peers, what drove their financial performance, what’s going on with laterals and their staffing and strategy and everything else. And what we expect them to do in the future. And so when you start doing all that, just like with everything else, you end up thinking about everything in aggregate, because that’s how you’re processing information. And James was like, “There’s this thing where a lot of these firms that have high percentages of poorly staffed or lowly staffed offices are really struggling with profitability.”

So we started, like we always do. And for those of you that do this for a living, you get this. And what I’m going to say is that, you fail more often with what we do. It’s like being a standup comic, right? What you see on the HBO special is a whole lot of booze in crickets, in clubs. Because you are failing at a rate that even baseball players hitting 250 aren’t failing as much like this. And same thing with data and analytics. There’s more on the cutting room floor that never resonates, but every once in a while you get into something, it’s like, “Wow, okay, this is cool.”

And so we started running the numbers and it was really, I’d have to pull up the exact numbers, but in a nutshell, over a 10-year period we looked at firms that had at least 10 offices over a 10-year period. And what we wanted to be able to see is, those that had, at least half of those had 20 attorneys in, at least half of their offices had at least 20 attorneys versus those that did not have at least 20 attorneys in half of their offices.

And in a nutshell, the firms that did not have at least 20 attorneys in half of their offices, where they had 10 or more offices, and this was over a 10 year period, their profitability was about 35 points behind those that did, just their net operating income and their profit for equity partner growth numbers over the same period were about 40 points behind. And there was this clear translation, not necessarily with revenue, but with profitability, that the greater number of offices you have, especially those that are poorly staffed, the greater the drag on your profitability. And that’s what brings it back to what question was, which was, is there a there, there for firms, right? And you look at FisherBroyles, you look at Ramon, you look at some of these other firms that are going largely distributed right now.

And you brought this up, and this is your point that I’m making right now, because you brought this up in the thing about the distributed firm being sort of the emerging market. And I think you were spot on with that. I think we’re going to see more of that. I think we’re absolutely going to see more of that. And I think part of it is, I think there’s inherent pricing advantages. Gina Passarella and I talk about this all the time, because if you want, by the way, I can insult her. If you want to talk about a nerd, she’s a complete and total nerd, but one of the best people you’ll ever meet and get to work with. And we talk about this, a lot of this stuff offline behind the scenes all the time. And it’s like, okay, if I’m hiring associates now and I’m going into Kansas city or Oklahoma city or Wheeling West Virginia or Omaha Nebraska, or any place like that, I don’t have an office there.

So maybe I can show them out of the Chicago office, or there’s a phone number associated with Chicago or New York or D.C. How does the client know that these people are not there? They probably don’t. And I’m not saying that there’s anything subverse is going on with any law firm, but from a pricing perspective, I would be pricing them out at … I’ll give you an example. I live in Oklahoma City. My work address is technically New York, because I’m based out of the New York office. And by the way, I try to argue that all the time with compensation and I fail miserably, like I should be paid like I’m living in New York. They’re like, “Yeah no, not going to happen.”

But if I’m a firm, why wouldn’t I price somebody out at that point? Because you are getting a massive labor break at that point and you don’t have the overhead. The cost structure is a little bit lower. And yeah, I think that we’re going to see more of this. But I think it’s going to be a very specific type of attorney. And I think it goes back a little bit to what Ralph Baxter did at or back, what was it now 15 years ago or so when they opened up the wheeling. We have people that they’re not interested in becoming partner. They’re not interested in getting really involved in all this. They want to do their 40, 45 hours a week. They’ll make a buck, 5,200 grand a year. They’ll continue practicing law, which is something that they love, but they’ll have work-life, family balance, they’ll be home.

And so now imagine your ability to do that with a distributed firm model or even a hybrid model. And I think it becomes a boom for profitability, for a lot of firms. And I think we’re going to see that happening a little bit more, but I think the struggle, Robin that you brought up and I think it’s real and I think it’s right, is the inevitable culture clash with that. Because this is, we’ve done this, this is a profession that is based entirely on precedent. So we’re talking about things now that there really isn’t a ton of precedent for that you sort of have to fight against.

Robyn:

Okay. So I have three responses to everything you just said. I’ve been counting them in my head to make sure I didn’t forget them. So the first being the overhead conversation, the second being the type of lawyer it takes, and the third firm culture. So first overhead. There is going to be overhead. And not that you said that there wasn’t going to be overhead, but the overhead is just going to be different. Having business professionals also spread throughout the country in and of itself. And the aggregate allows costs to be lower as you pointed out in your own personal example, but also just the infrastructure required as different obvious the real estate cost goes down, if not disappears.

Second is the type of lawyer it takes. And I don’t know that I agree, if you were saying that it takes somebody who may not necessarily be seeking the partner track, I don’t know that I necessarily agree with that. I have somebody out in California, female-led firm, two partners. They’re bringing on partners who, they themselves as partners are very much seek as the founders of the firm, created this firm, coming out of big law firms. They created this firm because they wanted that work-life balance and they have sought out and brought on other partners who are just as ambitious for the ownership and that partner track, it’s just a different partner track. It’s not the way partner track looked for the past 300 years or the past complete history of the profession. It’s just a different type of partner model. And then the culture, the point that I brought up at the conference that I still hold true to is that I’ve heard some of the blow back from, “Oh, well we’ve got to have the associates in the office. How will they ever have that apprenticeship model with the partners if they’re not popping into their office?”

Well, how much do they actually learn, other than just getting FaceTime and getting in front of an attorney, a partner, and saying like, “Hey, I’m Joe Schmo, please don’t forget I exist.” Which yes, there’s benefit to that, for sure. I’m not going to pretend there isn’t. But where I think that the apprenticeship really comes in is, “Okay, I’m a partner in a law firm and I’m going out to do a business development activity and hey, Joe Schmo, come with me to Atlanta for this conference.” Because now that I don’t have to pay all these other costs, I can reallocate some of those budget dollars to actually bringing you into those situations much earlier in your in track, so that you actually get to meet clients face-to-face.

You get to see how I develop business live and in the wild. Which I think that is much more, my humble opinion, that’s much more effective than just making sure that you’re showing your face darkening that partner’s doorway. So, that’s my reaction to all the things you said.

Patrick:

Well, I mean, let me clarify one thing though too, right? Because when I said with the partnership component of it, I was referring specifically to, I think it was ORIC that it was a little bit of a different model when they put wheeling in relative to some other places. And we’ve seen it with a few other firms that have done back office service centers and have lawyers practicing out of there as well. I think the culture component of it is going to be around the FaceTime and what’s going to be considered. And we had somebody say this the other day on a webinar, which is, “If you want to make partner, if you want that exposure, then you have to be places where you’re going to get to FaceTime.” And I think that’s the mindset that is … I think it’ll probably event change a little bit, but still you’re balancing some of that.

I agree with what you said. And I think this is a thing that makes it really interesting is that we are in that really transformative period right now. And if you think about the biggest, what have been the biggest arguments over the last 20, 30, 40 years in legal? It was the, geez, do we go from the IBM electrics to the word processing and do we actually bring people into word processing? Do we get rid of the library? Do we go from books to the CD towers? And then do we go from CD towers to online? And now we’re getting into distributed workforces and things along those lines and greater use of technology. And I think there’s a lot that has to change in alignment with that. Because you mentioned, some of the things that you just mentioned are also driven by compensation structure, how people are paid.

And how we price services as well too. So, how much of this changes with the billable hour becoming less of a default unit of measurement than it has been for 200 years and continues to be in many cases. Right now, how much of this change is to where it’s more efficiency based? I think there are a lot of challenges, and do not get me wrong, I think there are a lot of challenges with hybrid models. One of them that Gina and I have spent a lot of time, because Gina, one of the things that’s sort of a passion project of hers was the mental health component of it. And I cannot say enough about how well that’s been done and the issues that it’s raised because it’s the stuff that we never talk about.

Even we’re talking before we start recording about Ted Lasso and the fact that even in that program, they started tackling mental health in sports, which we know is an issue. And any of us who’ve ever played have always dealt with the ups and the downs and the stress and the pressure and everything else. But you never talked about it. I mean, you talked openly about the fact that you pulled a hamstring or you tweaked your knee, but you never talked about the struggles with the mental health component of it, which were probably in some cases bigger impediments to overcome. Gina and I were talking about this, and Heather, you and I may have talked about this as well too. Because you also work with a distributed workforce.

I do as well. One of the things that we know, we both employ really smart people. So one of the things to there is, really smart people get bits and pieces of information, they tend to fill in the blanks themselves. And where do we all go? None of us are optimist. We all go to the most negative thing possible because we’re wired to say, “Okay, well I can handle this. And this is what’s likely going to happen and I can handle this.” But that’s the sort of thing that gets into issues with morale and the team and everything else. So I do think we’ve already been sort of conditioned to handle and over communicate, make sure that we’re not leaving a lot of stuff to the imagination, we’re being more transparent.

I think that’s one of the sort of byproducts of all this that we’re not really talking about is we become far more transparent. But I think this is the struggle. We had a lawyer one time in a round table, we were talking about this, go, “Well, how do we know that you’re not working for three different firms at once?” I said, “I mean, it’s an interesting question.” You don’t know. I mean, I think, ALM knows that I’m not because I spend all day in meetings, right. We’re always on the same calls and everything else. But in some firms, it only takes person to have done that someplace somewhere and it gets around and then everybody has that fear. So I think that there’s some of that we’re going to deal with. I think the other part though, too, is how do we recognize warning signs.

We’re not seeing physical body changes. We’re seeing pretty much everybody from the neck up, or the shoulders up most of the time. We’re not seeing things that we would pick up on in the office. If there are substance abuse issues or if there are the body language or any of these things that would tell us that somebody might be struggling. And so I think that’s something that’s going to be a challenge, moving forward for some of this, especially with the mental health component of it. I think the BD component’s going to be different as well, too. I mean, we are all, I used to be in sales. It’s hard to tell by the way I talk, I know you get used to walking into a room and if you’re doing a presentation, you’ve got, you’re in a conference room somewhere.

I mean, while you’re talking, you’re simultaneously looking at everywhere and you’re, you’re figuring out where the power structure is. And there’s always people in there that can red light something, but they can’t greenlight anything, but boy can they red light it. So, you know you got to win them over. Well, we’re used to that and we sort of do it organically. And there’s a lot of lawyers that have gotten really, really good at that. They’ve gotten really good at that. They’re really good at getting in there and developing business and sort of killing the presentation. Now, we’ve got to do it online. And we can’t see who’s looking at who, because we’ve got the Brady Bunch on our screen.

And so if somebody’s looking to the side, you have no idea if they’re looking at Bob or Susie or they’re checking out their email that’s coming in on the other side or instant messaging or whatever it is. So I think the skills are going to change for that. I think how people buy will change as well, and why they buy. And so I think we’re going to get into, this one little thing has a lot of potential reverberations that are going to change what and how we do business. And what the law firm of the future looks like. And what success looks like in the future for a lot of lawyers. And I think it’s absolutely fascinating. I really do.

Robyn:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I will say one thing in terms of the skills will change, as you said, we have a completely distributed work model and I’m always, I’ve always been somebody who prefers transparency and probably over communication because exactly to your point, if people are kept out of the loop on things, they immediately go to the negative and it’s so much harder to come back from that negative head space than it is to just tell everybody what’s going on upfront, to the extent they need to know something. But I think that that is from my perspective, the number one challenge for law firms, be it business professionals or lawyers or whatever, just that environment to be able to, I don’t know, even exist virtually.

Because that’s one of the things I have said. LISI has grown so exponentially over the past couple of years, and I’ve said to the team, “We’re growing faster than, it feels like we’re growing faster than we could handle sometimes. But what has underpinned our success is the fact that we are very good at communication. And that we’re all open and speaking to one another.” We’re all making sure that it works and that we’re being transparent. And without being negative, I think that’s just going to be a challenge for law firms, just based on, at least on my experience. There are very few firms that I think are able to capture that same level of culture. And especially that just gets harder the bigger you get, you know?

Patrick:

Let me ask you a question. How many firms you were in? What, three firms? Two firms?

Robyn:

Two.

Patrick:

Two. And you were going into the office pretty much every day during that period. Maybe one day a week at home sometimes, depending on-

Robyn:

Yeah, I had four days a week at the office, one day a week at home. Yeah.

Patrick:

Okay. So in those four days a week in the office, when you would walk down the hallway with some of the attorneys that had their own offices, how many doors were closed?

Robyn:

I knew that was going to be your question. I knew it. Almost all of them.

Patrick:

Right. And how often did they see each other during the day? And so here’s the other question, where did they congregate? If they congregated anywhere, where was it? The kitchen?

Robyn:

Sure, kitchen. Yeah, I mean, I’m just trying to mentally picture what that looked like, because I forget. Yeah, kitchen, workspace or around a legal assistance desk, but that’s because one of them was stopping to talk to the legal assistant, another attorney caught them there.

Patrick:

So, you’re going to have, I mean, and I’ve talked to some managing partners and I said, “Different size firms and everything else.” And I had one of them one time, because I asked him, I said, “Walk me through your day.” And he said, “Well, he goes in the morning.” I walk to the left and I walk down because where his office was. And I check in with everybody, and pretty much I have nothing on my calendar, I just handle problems. And then the afternoon I go to the right, and I do the exact same thing. And it happens every single day. Because they were able to address a lot of these things just by popping in. They didn’t have to get on somebody’s calendar. They didn’t have to do that. So I think that there are some things that are going to be missed through that.

But to your point, a lot of people, we were going to the office, we were closing the door. We weren’t seeing anybody. We have people now, I know I’ve talked to people in firms that they’re 45 minutes to an hour getting in and then they get in their office, they have some coffee, say hi to a few people. And then they’re on Zoom calls the rest of the day. So what’s the point?

Robyn:

So, I’ll tell you when I was working in an office, first of all, I always kept my door closed because I’m very loud. So I would tell everybody, “My door is always open, even though it’s actually always closed. Because I’m so loud and I’m saving you the aggravation of having to listen to me.” So there’s that. But also, I was in meetings all day long. The reason I worked from home one day a week, I mean, it came after I had my first child and never questioned it. But I protected that day with my life. Because it was the only day I had to actually get stuff done without being interrupted. So even though I had my door closed all the time, people are always knocking on it and that’s great. I’m happy for people to come in and collaborate or ask questions or whatever, but I am the type of person, point being, I’m the type of person that I really love working from home because I can more easily close off and say, “Okay, I need 30 minutes to think without interruption.”

And nobody has the power to just come and knock on my door.

Patrick:

Yeah.

Robyn:

Do you know what I mean?

Patrick:

No, 100%.

Robyn:

But not everybody’s like that. And I also think for the record that there … So, okay. Here’s my prediction for business of the future. Not even specifically law firms of the future. Business of the future, you’re never going to be able to fully get away from some sort of central office type location. And I’m not going to get into the nuance of, a full office dedicated to a specific company, whatever. But let’s just pretend we’ve solved all of those sort of problems, but a firm, a company, whatever, is going to essentially, in my opinion have a co-working space where some people, because there are people who need to get out of their houses, who need to have a routine that takes them on the bus, on the train to the office.

They, get through that routine and then they leave that office at the end of the day. And so those people can have dedicated workspaces that are always theirs. There are going to be people like me who can work from anywhere, but sometimes need to be in the office so I can reserve a workspace. And then there are going to be people who are so influxed that they just need a touch point, that they can find a lounge space that’s open, a desk that’s open, a cube that’s open to come and work from. And in my opinion, anybody who owns a business that has an office should listen to me, in my opinion, that is the work force. That is the work environment of the future so that you can meet the needs of your staff at whatever sort of level they’re at, because everybody needs something different.

But also are encouraging the people who work on the go, like I do. I could work standing in a train station almost as well as I can work sitting in my home office or in a physical office. And for the record, have done so. It’s just, that is just what the future of work looks like to me.

Patrick:

Well, so this is, I think this is a really interesting question to ask you, because it’s come up in a few different types of conversations around remote and hybrid working and everything else. Because as we’ve talked about, there’s upsides, there’s downsides. And we could debate if there’s greater potential one way or the other. But does it disproportionately impact women more than men because of the fact that, if you’re working from home more often and there’s kids involved and everything else, I mean, I think is that something that you think we need to be cognizant of when we’re talking about this and some of the disproportionate stress that’s being put on employees? Whether they’re lawyers, whether they’re staff, whether we’re talking about software development versus legal. Because you just mentioned it that right before you get your first child, you requested that one day from home. So I’m kind of curious as to your thoughts on that?

Robyn:

Yeah. And gosh, I wish I had the statistics at my fingertips but I don’t remember numbers as well as you do off the top of my head, but I mean-

Patrick:

I just make them up.

Robyn:

Yeah. Well they talked about, oh gosh, what was the term for it? Anyway, a couple months into the pandemic there was a lot of focus on the fact that women were disproportionately affected. And I think to be fair, I think people who are caregivers and that need not necessarily be a woman, but people who are caregivers are disproportionately affected. Because in a traditional construct like my family. So I have a husband, he’s a firefighter. He can’t do his job from home. But even it friends of ours who husband and wife both work, the husband maybe was the more significant breadwinner. So his job was not the one that went on hold so that somebody was home to be with the kids who were schooling from home. People who were caregiving in any way, whether that be for children or aging parents or, fill in the blank, were adversely affected during the pandemic. And are I think benefited, I think there’s the opportunity to be benefited from the flexibility of a distributed work model when they don’t have to focus on caregiving at the same time. That’s where I think the distinction lies.

Patrick:

Yeah, I think it’s going to be, by the way, that makes sense. I think, I don’t have the issue unfortunately anymore, but I know a lot of my friends, and you might have this as well. And we know people that do, where you’re in that situation where you’re taking care of kids, you’re also taking care of your parents. And you’ve got sort of both ends of the spectrum that you’re having to deal with. But when they’re in the house, and I think this is the thing that I’m a little bit … These are all things that are going to get worked through, they’re going to get solved. But these are issues they’re going to come up is the caregiving component of it. I think the work-life balance is something we’re not talking about at all.

I think we deserves a lot of conversation because when the pandemic happened, it was really interesting. I saw a lot of people starting to post things on social media about how much they were working. And it’s like, “Welcome to our life. I’ve done this for 20 years. I’ve done this for 20 years.” You start to feel guilty when you’re sitting in front of the TV, watching a game and you don’t have your laptop with you. And even though you might only get through 15 emails during a three hour game, because you’re busy yelling at the TV. But I think that there is, I’ve talked to a lot of people. They’re like, “Yeah, I don’t know what to do. I just can’t sit and watch something anymore and just take a break because I feel I need to be working. Anytime I’m not doing something that is work related, I feel I’m letting things down.”

And so I think that’s a challenge that we’re going to have to get around and we’re going to have to learn how to relax again. And that’s a problem. I’ll end my part on this. I recognize the fact that I am a workaholic. And I don’t know how to change. And that’s, I think a problem. And I think people are starting to realize now that they’re working from home that they’re very quickly falling into that same trap. And we have mobile devices and we have, and everywhere we go, we’re never away. I’m still trying to figure out, what’s the purpose of the out of office anymore? I mean, are we really-

Robyn:

To let people know that they shouldn’t expect an instantaneous response, it’ll be an extra five minutes.

Patrick:

That’s funny.

Robyn:

It’s true though.

Patrick:

The point that’s going to make it to an out of office thing, right? Like, “Hey, look, I get it. Just give me an extra five minutes before I respond to you, okay?”

Robyn:

I know.

Patrick:

“And if I don’t respond in five minutes, you can contact these 15 different people who will probably have the same message.” But yeah, I think you’re right. I think you’re right. I know we got a wrap.

Robyn:

Yeah, I know. As I knew would happened, I didn’t bother preparing questions because I knew we would just go on and on about all the things we’re nerdy about. And for all you lucky listeners, I do think that there’s a lot to chew on here. So Patrick, as always, I love you. I love talking to you. Thank you for your time. I appreciate it. I’m sure we’ll do this again. Yeah, we’ll do this again sometime.

Patrick:

This is great. And thank you. And you guys keep doing the great work that you’re doing, because the work product you guys are putting out is really, really good. And I love seeing the new stuff you guys come up with. So keep it up. I’ll talk to you guys a little bit later. Thank you all so much.

Robyn:

Thanks, Patrick. Talk to you soon.

 

You have been listening to All the Things, the podcast from Legal Internet Solutions Incorporated, where we bring you all the things. Whether it’s three things we learned, hearing from a legal marketing insider and ask me anything session, or that one more thing we’ve been dying to tell you all month long, but couldn’t. That’s All the Things. Our next episode will be out in a week, wherever you get your podcasts. And you can join us for the live events every Friday at 12:30 Eastern on our LinkedIn channel for our livestream, where we bring you All the Things live.