On today’s Legally Speaking Podcast, I am delighted to be joined by Bill Reid.

Bill is the senior founding partner of Reid Collins, a former federal prosecutor, a two-time Benchmark Litigation U.S. Plaintiff Litigator of the Year, an adjunct professor atthe University of Texas School of Law, and the author of Fighting Bullies: The Case for a Career in Plaintiffs’ Law. Over the course of his career, he has prosecuted precedent-setting cases and recovered billions of dollars in complex commercial litigation.This episode is not just about plaintiffs’ law. It is about how the legal profession defines success, why so many talented young lawyers are funnelled down narrow paths before they really understand their options and what it actually takes to develop real trial judgment in a profession increasingly shaped by leverage, efficiency and now AI.

For our UK and international listeners, think of this as a conversation about claimant-side trial work, professional formation, and whether the system is still set up to produce great courtroom lawyers.

So why should you be listening in? 

You can hear Rob and Bill discussing:

– Mastering the human element remains essential for trial success 

– Prioritising experience over prestige 

– The traditional legal career model is being reshaped 

– AI’s encroachment exposes the inefficiency of the billable hour 

– Irreplaceable Human Skills.

Connect with Bill Reid here – https://www.linkedin.com/in/williamtreidiv

Transcript

Young lawyers most enjoy their careers the more responsibility they get. 

What is gonna happen when those jobs are not there anymore? When clients say, I am not paying 20 lawyers hourly fees to go look at this database of documents when Claude can do it in two hours. On the margins, that takes down the need for manpower. And I describe in my book that that pyramid could become a wine bottle. You could argue that it might become somewhat of a diamond where there’s more people at the top. We might end up with the $25,000 an hour lawyer. We could end up with that. 

Imagine a world in which we are now on chat GPT-12 and Claude 14, and all of the tasks of junior lawyers can be performed in hours. Who is going to be best capable to use those tools? On today’s Legally Speaking podcast, I’m delighted to be joined by Bill Reed.

Bill is a senior founding partner at Reed Collins, a formal federal prosecutor, a two-time benchmark litigation US Plaintiff Litigator of the Year, an adjunct professor at the University of Texas School of Law, and the author of Fighting Bullies: The Case for a Career in Plaintiff’s Law. Over the course of his career, he has prosecuted precedent-setting cases and recovered billions of dollars in complex.

Commercial litigation. This episode is not just about plaintiff’s law. It’s about how the legal profession defines success, why so many talented young lawyers are funneled down narrow paths before they really understand their options and what it actually takes to develop real trial judgment in a profession increasingly shaped by leverage, efficiency, and now AI. For our UK and international listeners, think of this conversation about claimant side trial work.

Professional information and whether the system is set up to produce great courtroom lawyers. Welcome to the show, Bill. Good to be here, man. Looking forward to it. it’s absolutely a pleasure to have you on the League of Speaking podcast. And before we dive into your career and all the great things you’re getting up to, we have a couple of quick fire icebreaker questions for you. Which is firstly, what is your favorite beverage, which I think I might know because we just chatted about off-air, and what is your preferred choice of footwear on a typical workday? Good questions. I’d go with red wine.

Burgundy’s probably my favorite, but anywhere old world would suffice. And you know, I live in Texas, so I’ve got boots. That’s what I’m doing. there we go. Love it. Good old Texas boots. Good, good, good stuff. Okay, now what’s one piece of legal tech or everyday technology you now rely on that you would have seemed unthinkable about using many years ago when you started your career? I didn’t even have AI on my radar when I started my career because I’m older than dirt. But even even like

A year and a half ago I thought AI was a joke. And now I use AI routinely every day. And it’s only getting better every day. Like today is the worst version of it. Tomorrow will be better and so on and so forth. Absolutely. So let’s let’s go back to the beginning though, Bill, if we may. Would you mind telling our listeners a bit about your background, career journey? And yeah, just fill us in on some of the the stories along the way. I would say that like a lot of young lawyers who are just starting in the profession.

There wasn’t really anything to read, there wasn’t really much guidance, and school did not provide me much of a roadmap for what to do with my legal degree. In other words, like school’s very good and and I again I’m speaking to the American legal education system, which you know I’m a professor at UT, but it’s very doctrinal, it’s very theoretical, and it’s hard to understand how you might take all that knowledge and actually pursue a career that is fulfilling. And so

Basically I had to figure it out for myself. And I think that describes most people’s journeys. So in doing that, and in order to optimize my courtroom experience to be a courtroom lawyer, I decided early on to go become a prosecutor, which was around year four or five of my career. After I had worked for a judge and after I’d worked at a regional law firm. And in prosecuting criminal cases for the US federal government.

I was just unfulfilled, right? Victory winning was not really winning. Victory simply meant that you normally a young, impoverished, young man would go to prison for a long time for really no great purpose, but more importantly for no great benefit to me. So it was actually depressing. So when I left the government after three years of being a prosecutor and began my career path as a claimant side lawyer, I began to marry true purpose with reward.

And to me, that was like it I it it no one told me about this in law school. No one I had to kind of figure it out for myself. But like the first time that I represented, you know, kind of a let’s just say overmatched plaintiff or, you know, claimant against an institutional defendant, won the case, got a contingency fee, and made my client happy. I just felt like the stars had aligned and I just kind of figured out.

Hey, this is what I want to do, this is what would be fulfilling to me. Let’s march forward then to your book and talk about the sort of career myths if if we may, because your book takes aim at a very sort of entrenched idea in law that the best young lawyers either go into big law for money or public interest for meaning. So why do you believe that is such an incomplete, in many cases, damaging way to frame legal careers? It essentially excludes being a claimant side lawyer.

Like no one in law school ever said to me, you know, Bill, you could choose to exclusively be a claimant side lawyer if you would like to be. And so the way I I well, the path to writing my book started from the fact that I’m a professor at the University of Texas Law School. I teach one class a year. The second to last class each year is a class entitled Advice I Wish Someone Gave Me. You know, when I was sitting in the audience of a class.

Of course, no one gave that to me. And I I can assume that this is similar in the UK, but in the US, tenured faculty at the top twenty-six law schools in America have on average 3.7 years of private practice experience. So they don’t have a lot of real-world experience to give to young lawyers. And by and large, the experience that they have comes from having been an associate in big law. The reality is that what big law does in the US.

Which I can speak much more authoritatively to, is that it deprives young lawyers of really the experience that they need to figure out what is best for them, what would make them fulfilled for a career. And as I like to say, you know, if you’re gonna practice 2,000 hours a year for a 30 to 40 year career, you’re looking at 60 to 80,000 hours of your life. So if you spend that time towards a goal that you won’t be proud of, you won’t be satisfied by.

And end up being depressing, kind of like when I was a prosecutor, you can then begin to understand why an overwhelming number of lawyers in the US anyway, and I assume the stats are similar in the UK, suffer from extraordinary depression rates, suicide rates, substance abuse. Because when you enter a high stress profession like the law, and then you marry it to a lack of purpose career.

like representing all the same people that you would rather see held accountable, then you could begin to see why maybe a claim a claimant side career could be more rewarding for at least some. And I think that’s really the blind spot of law school. And that’s why I wrote my book. To essentially give people a broader framework within which to think about how to pursue a career that would be most fulfilling to them.

And I love that you talk about the fulfillment piece. I mean, we’ve had representatives of Law Care, which is the largest mental health charity for lawyers in the UK, come on and talk about, you know, how they’ve been oversubscribed and underfunded because of all the reasons that you’ve mentioned before, where people are highly stressed, maybe, you know, turning to alcohol and various other bits and pieces. So it’s great that people are actually producing resources, trying to, you know, basically improve things, because I now want to talk about the big law sort of conveyor belt.

that I know you you sort of touched on because you’ve described the wider system as very much a conveyor belt to big law. Where do you think then law skills are failing students most when it comes to showing them what real trial career can look like before their part is effectively set? I think law schools in the and again in the US and I know the the system in the UK does involve the apprenticeship component and I and I honestly think an apprenticeship component to US legal education would be a huge step forward.

So in some respects, I think that the UK system as I understand it is a little less subject to the conveyor belt as described in my book. But in the US, you have a bunch of law professors who’ve never lived in the real world running these law schools that are purely academic doctrinal paths to learning law, which undeniably lawyers need to know the law. I’m not disputing the concept. but when it comes time to figuring out career paths.

The law schools seem to defer in large part to big law and allow them to dictate the timing of on-campus interviews, the structure of the offers made. And we now have this concept of the I think it’s called the jumbo offer or whatever it is. So big law has now moved on-campus interviews to mid-first year of a law student’s three-year postgraduate career in the US. And then they offer these jumbo offers.

That essentially require a given student to commit solely and exclusively to a single law firm, which deprives them of the ability to do what I think the English apprenticeship system allows, which is the ability to sample a number of different career paths to decide which one is right for you. And so where I think law schools bear some culpability in this conveyor belt is that they’re not actively in any way.

Preventing the big law firms from doing whatever it is that they feel is in their best interest. Now, there is a symbiosis here, and that is that we in America graduate about 40,000 lawyers a year, which is already too many lawyers for how many jobs there are. And one of the biggest ways to employ law students, if you are in elite law schools, is to give a bunch of

your students over to big law and then now you get to say that you succeeded because they they have a gainful employment path upon graduation. But that doesn’t really measure what I think the true measurement of success ought to be, which is what do those lawyers think about their career five or ten or fifteen years out and are they truly satisfied or are they calling that helpline you mentioned earlier because they’re suffering from burnout and fatigue, because they chose the wrong path

Not having really thought about it too much. That’s such an important point. And I think, you know, one of the things that you you you argue that sort of experience beats salary early on. You know, a lot of people chase going to big law, don’t they? The attractive big ticket money that’s available to them that’s widely marketed in all the media public publications and so forth. So in a legal world then, where sort of the real courtroom exposure can be surprisingly rare.

What choices should young lawyers make if they generally want to become first rate litigators rather than just service large cases from a distance? Well, again, your system kind of requires your young lawyers to elect a path that would either lead to the courtroom and become a barrister, or in large measure go to like a solicitor firm where they I I think know they’ll be doing more of the kind of paperwork and more of the client interface.

So we don’t have that concept in the US. And so lawyers are, I guess, in some sense, more free to choose their path. But again, I think you said it best, and I said it in my book experience beats salary. And so what I like to say to young lawyers is wherever you’re going to go on your path, talk to someone that is on the path that you’re about to choose, who’s call it three to five years ahead of you on the path. And if they are giving you a good sense that

They are getting the type of experience that you would like for yourself. They are getting access to the courtroom if you if they’re pursuing a courtroom path, or they’re getting access to real responsibility and real client relationships if they’re pursuing a solicitor path. If they are getting meaningful responsibility, and all the studies show this, young lawyers most enjoy their careers, the more responsibility they get. And for whatever reason,

It seems to me that these things run in inverse proportions. In other words, the more salary you get at the outset, it seems like the less responsibility you would get. And so it becomes somewhat counterintuitive to young lawyers to reject the prestige of the big law or the magic circle firm in favor of the kind of less prestigious path that would get more responsibility. If my career is any example of this.

I would say that by choosing experience over prestige, young lawyers can optimize their flexibility as their career proceeds because the real problem, and I think it’s getting exacerbated with the advent of AI, and I know we’re gonna talk about that, is that it’s real difficult for young lawyers to get real meaningful experience. And without meaningful experience, it’s difficult to gain your your C legs as a practicing lawyer in whatever path you choose.

It’s important, isn’t it, that you don’t get blinded by just, you know, the headline on on the salary. It’s about I like you say, when you’re early into your career acquiring your craft, you always talk a lot about skill stacking. That comes on to my next next question. That you know, wherever you go with your job moves or you start long are the days where you start at one firm and you retire at that firm and you you know, there’s so much optionality out there now for the legal world, different career paths, different

roots, d so forth and so forth. But wherever you go, you want to be acquiring skills and stacking that and building your experience and your values so you can transfer that and hopefully build on that and you’re building momentum to sort of push yourself forward. So building on what you’re saying there then, what point do young lawyers realize they’re not building the skills that they thought they were building? And what keeps so many smart lawyers stuck on a path they already suspect may not be right for them? Well I think you’re excluding a whole

percentage of lawyers, I describe one in my book, her name is Abby, who quit the practice of law, right? So I think, and again, I I don’t live other people’s lives. I can’t really tell you their subjective thoughts, but I can tell you that the facts kind of bear out, at least in the US, that a very large percentage of lawyers who begin their career in big law leave in like three to five years. If that three to five year big law path

actually gain them some level of responsibility and experience that they then could take somewhere else, then I wouldn’t be so opposed to it. But my belief, informed by speaking to lots of young lawyers, is that that three to five year big law path is essentially very high stress, very high salary, but very low responsibility and experience. And so my advice to young lawyers is, you know, you’ve already got all the prestige and your fancy law degree.

you’ve already got a nice what other people call resume, what I call piece of paper. So now it’s time to go get that experience so that you can put it to work for yourself. And that will give you so much more optionality at that three to five to seven year point in your career where you really figure out, hey, this is the path I want to go on. Because if you want to be a courtroom lawyer and you have no courtroom experience, you’re dead, right? Like I’d like I like to talk about this all the time.

Well, if you needed brain surgery or a family member needed brain surgery and you walked into the hospital and the surgeon’s like, Well, my good friend, this is my first rodeo. I’ve never really done this before, but let’s give it a go. You’d be like, No way, I’m not doing that, right? And that’s the same way clients are when choosing a courtroom lawyer. Again, it’s great context and and you know, really appreciate you sharing that. I I guess a a s a simplified question. You know, what is the psychological cost of the wrong work? You know, people go into these

big law firms, great intensity as a young lawyer, not necessarily real accountability, you know, that real judgment, which again with the advent of AR, which we’ll talk about, you know, people are expecting more of that human judgment. You know, what is that psychological cost to the lawyers early on in their careers getting the wrong work? Well I think you’re seeing it. And the people calling your helplines and the people that are suffering from all sorts of mental health problems in the US. But here’s the way I like to frame it, right, for young students. And I think that this is where at least law school in the US does not

Really do a great job in helping young lawyers think about their career path. But I ask a series of questions in some of my talks to young lawyers, and they’re would you rather questions? Like, would you rather represent the banks that nearly destroyed the world economy in 2008 and make a really good living doing it? Or would you rather be a claimant-side lawyer in pursuing claims against those same banks? and I think most people, if they gave it much thought,

Would be like, well, on that issue, I think I’d rather be on the claimant side, right? well, let’s take a different example, and this is not really what I do, but it’s just this is not you should do what is best for me. This is what how you should think about what is best for you. Would you rather, for example, represent the polluter who dumped whatever chemical into the local water supply that poisoned and sticking thousands of people? Or would you rather represent the claimant side of that and get those victims back some money?

Would you rather represent the patent infringer or the company who is the victim of the patent infringer, etc.? You can go down that list forever, but I really think those sorts of questions help young lawyers figure out what might sustain them for a sixty to eighty thousand hour career. Today’s episode is brought to you by Clio. If you’re spending more time managing your practice than practicing law, it’s time for a change.

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means help is always on hand when you need it. Visit Clio.com forward slash UK to find out why thousands of UK solicitors trust Clio. Now back to the show. Great framing as well and I can imagine

You know, it really gets people to think a little bit more than just be necessarily just so transfixed on this is the chosen path to go or this is where I must go in big law or this is what I should be chasing. And actually, like you say, giving that fulfillment, making them really deeper think why, why, why, why, why. And like you say, putting that time attachment to it as well. Okay, let’s talk about your firm because you’ve built a firm culture that rejects a lot of this sort of mythology around the prestige, success, making partner, all these things again we see banded around. What is the biggest lie?

Young lawyers are told about status in the profession and why does that lie survive for so long? So I’ve thought about this question a lot and and you know, I it’s part of my speech, but I I don’t know that it’s so much an affirmative lie, like an affirmative misstatement, as opposed to just no one really talks about the real issues. So when when I say like I can’t really say law school is putting out this message.

But what I would say is that I think many law students, at least in the US, are left with that dichotomy that you described a moment ago, which is either big law and high salary and prestige, or public interest and very low salary and perhaps not as much prestige. And it’s that dichotomy that law students are left to believe. No one affirmatively comes out and says, these are your two paths. But that is what they’re left to believe. And so

The purpose of my book is really to highlight this third category. That claimant side litigation is a way to marry prosperity with purpose, if that makes sense. Yeah, no. What a what a few beautiful w outlook and way to look at it. And so we’ve teased throughout the discussion AI. So now of course we have to talk about AI in the future of what law firms and billing models might look like, because you’ve also argued that AI is going to put serious pressure on the billable hour model. Why do you think

Particularly large law firms are structurally more exposed to that shift than perhaps some of the smaller firms. And what does that mean for those who win and lose legal talent over the next decade, in your view? Well, that’s a great question, Rob. And I feel like a lot of folks in the tech world were perhaps the canaries in the coal mine saying that, you know, AI was coming for the billable hour and the structure. But I feel like I might be one of the first lawyers to have written a book and, you know, obviously my book is now going on a year old.

But the reality is that when you start to think about what AI will do to the law profession, you have to begin to understand the business of law. So in my book, I did take some effort to describe how big firms work, how their economic models work, and how they make money. And I described it as a pyramid scheme in the sense that there are very few, let’s just call it, you know, corner office, rainmaker partners at the top.

And a lot of kind of you know minions at the bottom. And the way that big law makes money is what I like to call sending 20 bodies to solve the five body problem. In other words, there are very few businesses in the history of mankind that became more profitable, generated way more revenue and way more bottom line profits through inefficiency, right? If you start to think about it, the billable hour model rewards inefficiency.

What does AI do? It forces efficiency. So I just had dinner literally the night before last with two of the US’s most prominent trial lawyers on the big firm side. They’re friends of mine. And we were having this discussion about what happens to the billable hour model when the 20 lawyer, you know, solution to the five body problem, which may be a two body problem with AI.

is no longer possible. Well, I think we can all agree that what it means is fewer jobs. It also deprives young lawyers of what limited responsibility they’re able to get, thereby in my mind, actually making it even more imperative to young lawyers to gain that responsibility early. Because at the end of the day, if in three to five years me and one associate can do the task of what

five or six lawyers take today, that makes my boutique firm of 40 claimant side lawyers so much more powerful and so much more profitable because we can do so much more work with our 40 people. Whereas if you look at big law, and this is a problem for law school too, because when you start looking at this conveyor belt that I describe in my book where forty thousand graduates are coming out a year, a lot of them go into big law jobs and feeding that pyramid scheme.

What is gonna happen when those jobs are not there anymore? When clients say, I am not paying twenty lawyers hourly fees to go look at this database of documents when Claude you know 17 can do it in like two hours. And so I think that that on the margins takes down the need for manpower. And I describe in my book that that pyramid could become a wine bottle. You could argue that it might become somewhat of a diamond.

where there’s more people at the top. But you might end up, and this is the discussion I was having the other night with these two very prominent lawyers, probably whose names you know. and we might end up with the twenty-five thousand dollar an hour lawyer. We could end up with that, for those that want to cling to the old hourly fee model. But what we won’t have our teams of twenty lawyers all billing thousands of dollars an hour.

and by the way, these two lawyers are in the three thousand dollars an hour range at the upper echelon in the US. And how does that sustain itself with a 20-person team in AI? I just don’t see how it’s possible. Well, let’s dive a bit deeper and to get your thoughts then on that, particularly with you know AI coming in, stripping away a lot of that routine work. You know, it’s very much known for you know efficiencies. I think it’s gonna be even greater than that as it develops and enhances so many ways that AI can be used to transform.

industries not just legal, of course. And you know, so that legal work that we used to train junior lawyers, what does that mean for how the profession then develops the things that we probably need in light of the tech revolution coming in? Judgment, advocacy, you know, trial readiness. You know, who is most at risk of being left behind here? Well, there’s a lot to that question, Rob. Okay. So let’s just start with if you want to be a courtroom lawyer, getting into the courtroom is an imperative. There’s no substitute for it. You can’t learn by watching

You have to learn to be a courtroom lawyer by doing. And so, in order and and I really think that I know a lot of KCs in in the in the UK, and I think that the program by which junior barristers are brought up is that sort of program. And I said so, I think that in many ways, the UK system gets it so much more right than the US. You have to be much more deliberate.

in the US to achieve that courtroom status because, well, first of all, you’re not forced into this solicitor barrister decision at the outset of your career. You’re also and in the US, and then you’re also basically likely to choose if you go to a prestigious law firm in the US, likely to choose a big law career path at the outset. And, you know, these law schools in the US brag about sending, you know, two thirds of their graduates to big law. I I

I’m pretty well known. I think that’s shameful, actually. but if you don’t get that experience, I like to ask students today in twenty twenty six. Imagine a world in which we are now on chat GPT twelve and Claude 14, and literally all of the tasks of junior lawyers can be performed in hours. And who is going to be best capable to use those tools?

People that have actually done the real work before, right? So now the next generation of young lawyers, they don’t have that advantage of having actually done it the old-fashioned way. So they don’t have the same framework to gauge, is this AI solution the right one? That’s just one piece to it. But when you get to the point where now we’re in 2031 and we have all these advanced AI models, what is the one career path that is immune from AI?

I believe that courtroom lawyers will still exist. No one’s sending a laptop into court to go put it on like verbal or audio to go talk to a judge or to a jury. It’s not happening. So the one career path that at least seems to me to be safe for the short term until we send robots into court, is to be an effective courtroom lawyer. And the only path to doing that is to actually do it. I like that. I like that.

Do you think we could potentially be sending robots into courtrooms, just being a little bit devil’s advocate here? Could you ever see that happening? You know, we talk we read a lot about AI judges and everything else. You know, do you do you see that or is that just bonkers to you? It’s crazy to me that that would ever occur, but who knows, man. I don’t know what the future holds. I could tell you this though. When you say AI judges, I really think that judges, at least in the US and I assume in the UK, are very underpaid and overworked. And I think

the efficiency that will come to the judiciary through AI, and they’re already starting to see it. But imagine a world in which instead of trial in two or three years, which is a pretty aggressive trial plan for a highly complex case in the US, imagine a a trial schedule that is like six to nine months and discovery is like a month because AI is so powerful. Well, in that world

I think that everything moves faster and that would then again all past point two the experience of being a courtroom lawyer is going to be a skill that I think will remain valuable. Now it’s not for everybody and it’s only going to employ so many people, but to me, like that’s the sort of career path that young lawyers need to find. And it’s not the only one, but all I’m saying is, and I don’t have all the ideas, but young lawyers need to figure out how they’re going to use AI to their advantage.

And not get wiped out by it. Okay. So I just want you to sort of think back to three skills that you believe you have that have made you the successful lawyer you are today. And in light of the AI revolution that we live in, which of those three skills, if any, you think is going to be absolutely still needed, of high value? And are there any additional ones you would drop or replace to have three key skills of the future?

Rob, you asked really good questions. And so let me break it down into two sides. So when you say three skills, I’ll put it in your terms. The three skills of a solicitor that the solicitor needs to be successful are very different than the three skills that the barrister needs. The barrister doesn’t need a network. The barrister doesn’t need clients. And so the barrister doesn’t really need to be very commercial. Whereas the solicitor does. Now in the US,

In order for me to be successful, I have to do both. So when you talk about like client intake or rain making or all the things that a solicitor would do in the UK system, to me, being part of a a broad and vibrant network, one that has a two-way street, is absolutely critical to your success. Whereas

I know barristers that literally are, you know, a little bit wonky, don’t really have a network, don’t want to talk to anyone, but they’re so good that people want them simply for their courtroom skills, right? And so the number one skill of any trial lawyer, if you ask me, is being a storyteller. And so to me, like in the US, the best lawyers I know can do both of the things I’m describing in parallel, right? You if you have a partner that brings in all the clients.

And you’re simply in effect the barrister in the US. Maybe you can get away without networking and without people skills, but it’s really difficult to do if you really want to be in the top tier. So let’s go back to the solicitor skills. You also need to be a critical thinker, right? You need to brief well and come up with the right legal strategies. That’s true for both sides of the fence, solicitor and barrister. But then there’s this kind of third category that I’ve spent my whole career.

figuring out how do I define it. And you could call it grit. You could call it tenacity. You could call it just the unwillingness to lose. That competitiveness that I think the best trial lawyers have. And I definitely have that. Like you could play me in tidley winks and I’ll be pissed if I lose. Like I have to win anything that I do. And I think that it’s not just me. The best trial lawyers I know think and act like that. They’re just they’re not willing to give up. They’re

mentally tough. They’re just willing to stay with it until the right argument comes. But also the best trial oilers I know to a to a man or woman are at bottom great storytellers. And to me, AI may get there one day in terms of storytelling, but like how are you going to get a robot get up there and get 12 people on a jury in the US interested in what a robot has to say? I don’t think that that’s a that’s a uniquely human skill.

And it’s not going away anytime soon. Yeah, and a mentor said to me very early on, you know, facts tell but the stories sell. I think the better you are at storytelling and being able to take people on that journey, I I I absolutely

Agree. And you know, that that sort of wit mentality as well, because your clients don’t instruct you to lose, right? It’s the whatever it takes, you know, and it sounds like you have that grit, that mentality of like I’m gonna do my best to absolutely, you know, deliver on this and not give up. So I appreciate you sharing that. Okay, so let’s talk about opportunities here because you said the real opportunity for trial firms to be more visible early on.

Is how lawyers should be thinking about their careers, particularly young lawyers should be thinking about their careers. Okay. So if you are speaking directly to, you know, claimant firms, trial boutiques, playmant firms, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, what should they do differently right now to help the next generation discover these careers sooner and have more career fulfillment to not have some a lot of the things that we’ve discussed about already?

So I don’t profess to know how all other boutiques recruit young lawyers and train them, but I think that first of all, young lawyers in in my view, and I I teach them and I interact with them a to a fair degree, young lawyers are craving responsibility and experience. So if that’s what you’re selling I think you’re selling the right product, it marries with the right business purpose, right? Like so I just had a trial in November. I actually, by the way, used AI throughout the trial in

Running my closing argument as I thought through it with an AI helped me really think about it. Okay, but I had to tell the story. I can’t say it didn’t help me. But in that trial, more to your to the point of your question now, my young folks all got up on their feet and examined witnesses. And then they came back and told all their friends, hey, we actually got up on our feet in a hundred million dollar case and we put on witnesses. This is unbelievable. And so whatever version of that story other boutiques can sell and deliver on.

I think puts them above the heap because what when I say that responsibility and courtroom experience is going to be dominant in the future in terms of value, then I think those that can provide the avenue to that experience and responsibility will rise to the top. So it’s like a win-win, right? It’s in the law firm’s interest to have lawyers get trained so that they can be effective in the future. And

For for their part, the big lawyers, big involved lawyers I was you know, out with the other night, they were reminiscing on how are they gonna train their next generation of lawyers when there isn’t going to be a need for many juniors? Like how do you get the cream to rise to the top of people with experience when there is very limited experience to go around? So I don’t know if that answers your question, but

Well, I appreciate you sharing your your your thoughts. And I think it’s been really interesting learning about your journey, obviously the great work that you’ve been doing and how much you do give back and how much you care about the next generation of legal professionals as well, which is you know why we’re really keen to have this conversation. So finally then, for a law student, a trainee, a junior associate right now listening to this, who thinks actually, maybe I am on the wrong track. Maybe I did make some and wrong decisions early on. What is the first honest question they should ask themselves before it’s too late?

If thirty or forty years from now, continuing on the path you’re on, and you look back at your career, would it be something that you are proud of? Because thirty to forty years to work towards a goal you’re not proud of is an awful lot of misery and I think that in a nutshell describes the mental health problems with our profession.

Yep, can’t be more hard hitting and brutal than that. And I appreciate you sharing that. I think it’s important that people really do that thinking. Bill, this has been great. If our listeners want to follow you, learn more about you, your firm, or indeed your book, where can people go to find out more? Feel free to share any websites, any links. we’ll also share them with this episode for you too. well, my book is on Amazon. It’s called Fighting Bullies The Case for a Career as a Plaintiff’s Lawyer, what you would call claimant side lawyer.

my law firm is readcollins.com, spelled R-E-I-D, and I’m on LinkedIn. And Rob, it’s been a true pleasure. right back at you. Really enjoyed today’s discussion, Bill. Thanks so, so much for joining us on the Legally Speaking podcast sponsored by Clio. Wishing you lots of continued success with your own career and indeed the work you are doing to give back to the next generation and beyond. But for now, from all of us, over and out.

Thank you for listening to this week’s episode. If you like the content here, why not check out our world leading content and collaboration hub, the Legally Speaking Club, over on Discord? Go to our website www.legallyspeakingpodcast.com as a link to join our community there. Over and out.