Struggling to keep up with the demands of modern legal work?

Imagine a cloud platform that boosts productivity and simplifies your workflow. This week, I’m joined by Kaden Smith, Director of Inside Sales for EMEA at NetDocuments, the number one trusted cloud platform for legal professionals. Kaden dives into the future of document automation, the biggest challenges in adopting tech and what it takes to transform your practice with the right tools. If you want to stay ahead in the ever evolving legal tech world, don’t miss this episode, go give it a listen now!

So why should you be listening in?

You can hear Rob and Kaden discussing:
– Evolution of Legal Practices
– AI’s Impact on Legal Work
– NetDocuments’ Roles and Duties
– The Shift Towards Cloud-Based Solutions
– The Future of Legal Tech with AI

Connect with Kaden here

Transcript

What we’re really seeing, what we’re really feeling is this once in a lifetime evolutionary period in which the world really is changing.

00:07

There’s still an art to practising law.

00:09

How can we use AI to just make that art easier to access and easier to create?

00:15

It’s not the answer to every problem right now, today.

00:19

It’s not there yet, right?

00:22

But you can tell the direction that it’s heading.

00:24

And it’s one of those things where I think that we’re seeing a shift.

00:28

I’m going to dive in with you here.

00:30

And we’re going to determine because you know for sure whether something is going to help you do better work or not.

00:36

On today’s League Speaking podcast, I’m delighted to be joined by Kaden Smith.

00:41

Kaden is the director of Inside sales for Amir at Net Documents.

00:44

He joined Net Documents in 2017 and in 2022, Kaden one Net Document sales Leader of the year award and Net Documents Employee of the year.

00:53

Prior to Net Documents, Kayden was senior sales manager at Newstar Communications.

00:58

Kayden has a wealth of experience.

01:00

Sales and constantly exceeds annual quotas at net documents.

01:04

So a very big warm welcome, Kaden.

01:06

Thanks Rob.

01:07

Thanks.

01:08

Really excited to be here and you know more about me than I do so.

01:13

As my research team never lets me down.

01:15

But before we get into all the amazing work and experiences you’ve had to date, we do have a customary ice breaker question here on the Legally Speaking podcast, which is on the scale of one to 1010 being very real.

01:28

What would you rate the hit TV series suits in terms of its reality of the law, if you’ve seen it?

01:34

OK.

01:35

So I’ve seen, I’ve seen probably 3/4 of the first season.

01:41

I would probably go with a three.

01:46

And there we go a very confident 3.

01:48

And with that, we will move swiftly on to talk all about you.

01:52

So I, I spoke very, very briefly at the the intro, but would you mind telling our listeners a bit more about your background in career journey?

01:59

Yeah, of course.

02:00

So I, you know, I’m from Utah originally, so I’m, you know, you can tell by the accent that I’m, you know, not originally from the UK, but.

02:10

Live here now I started a net documents seven years ago and really sort of an entry level position.

02:19

I knew very, very little about the business of law about the you know, the way that law firms and corporate legal departments, you know, really function and you know how to sort of jump in at an entry level position.

02:33

We were, you know, cold calling law firms across the United States.

02:36

I speak Spanish so I was also in charge of.

02:40

Calling firms in Latin America as well, you know, speaking about document management and cloud and SaaS and the ways that their businesses could be enhanced with those different types of tools and was fortunate to move up through the ranks within that documents, you know, net documents is a company that really values.

03:04

You know, developing its people and finding ways to help them progress.

03:07

And so eventually, you know, went from just being the annoying cold caller who, you know, was all over.

03:14

Everybody trying to get him on the phone with somebody else to being the one who actually took those calls and you know, was then, you know, moved into some management and ended up managing our North American mid market sales team.

03:30

So, you know, law firms between the size of, you know, 25 people up to like 150 people or so.

03:35

Andthen, you know, after a little bit was asked if I’d be interested in moving here to the.

03:45

To sort of copy and paste a lot of what we had done from a growth perspective in the US and the North American markets over here in the UK and then through the rest of Europe, Middle East and Africa as well.

03:59

So that was almost three years ago.

04:02

And it’s been really, really incredible to get over here and to, you know, see the differences from a culture perspective, both in like normal life, of course.

04:12

Which is really really awesome.

04:14

But also from.

04:15

A, you know, a law firm perspective from a customer perspective, from a legal community perspective, you know, it’s, it’s, there are so many similarities from a, you know, the world of legal on a global scale, but there are also some really vast differences.

04:31

And they’ve been fun to, you know, to explore.

04:34

Yeah, absolutely.

04:35

And you mentioned legal community, and that’s something we’re really passionate here at the the Legally Speaking podcast about sort of, you know, building but also supporting that community with lots of, you know, great content and, and people’s journeys.

04:46

And so I want to kind of dive in a little bit more to net documents because, you know, the world’s basically #1 trusted cloud platform where legal professionals get to do their absolute best work.

04:55

And I think we’re all pro that.

04:57

So just tell us a little bit more about the pain points, really.

05:01

Document services and, you know, for lawyers that may be new to, to net documents, why they might consider it.

05:06

Yeah, yeah.

05:06

Great.

05:07

So the Net documents app score is a document and e-mail management platform, right.

05:12

So it’s interesting when you look at the history of legal tech and what firms have always used, you know, the really big firms, you know, since about the 90s or so have always had, you know, really robust document management systems where you know everything, you know, your documents are.

05:31

They’re very searchable, your emails are filed to matter locations where everything is very, you know, centralised, there’s one single source of truth, et cetera.

05:42

And the bigger firms always have these because you really needed a lot of infrastructure to make a system as you know, as impactful, as powerful as a, as a real document management system work.

05:56

You know, you had to have a tonne of on premise, you know, servers, you had to be able to babysit those things.

06:02

Need to have, you know, really sharp internal IT stuff to be able to keep that sort of engine running all the time and net documents is a little unique.

06:11

Founded in 1999 and our founder said, you know what, instead of being where technology sort of is today, we need to look at where the world is moving, which of course is, you know, at that time it was cloud computing and and the idea of being able to, you know, go into a law firm and say, hey, we’re going to take all of your really sensitive.

06:33

You know, matter related documents and emails, we’re going to put it on the Internet and then you’re going to access it or we’re going to put in the cloud and you’re going to access it with the, you know, the big bad Internet in the early 2000s, you know it was.

06:47

Not the easiest thing, I would imagine.

06:49

I wasn’t doing it luckily at that time.

06:52

And so, you know, they knew that in order to really survive in in the industry, they’d have to be able to prove that not only could you have all the benefits of of accessing all of your content in the cloud.

07:03

Which obviously has, you know, a tonne of benefits, most of which are really widely accessible or used today in some form by almost every firm at that time.

07:14

It was obviously, you know, very different story, but that you could also have even higher levels of security surrounding your your documents and your emails than any one firm could possibly provide for themselves with an on premise, you know, set up and.

07:30

You know, really chipped away at that.

07:33

Sort of mindset that everything needed to be in your office to be able to babysit.

07:37

But it also opened the door to smaller firms to say, you know what?

07:41

We don’t have the resources to maintain, you know, such a a vast amount of of tech to be able to keep a system like that running, you know, but now that it’s cloud based and it’s, it’s, you know, the, the same system is available to firms of all sizes, regardless of, of who you are, because it’s one platform.

08:01

Smaller firms could could get access to the same kind of technology that bigger firms had and so.

08:06

You know, from a total customer’s perspective, net documents is the most used document management system for legal in, in the, in the, in the world and especially in the smaller size, right?

08:22

So if you’re not a huge firm, it doesn’t mean that you don’t do the same kind of work that big firms do.

08:27

It doesn’t mean that you still, you know, you don’t need access to, to really robust searching tools and you don’t need high levels of.

08:36

30 you know, I’m taking care of everything that you have.

08:40

It just might mean that you have less total people and can’t employ an entire IT team, right.

08:45

And so I think that that’s where you’re seeing the world really shift.

08:49

A lot of firms will start out using sort of an all in one type of system.

08:54

Clio is a great example of that where you know it it does document management things, you know, it can store documents, it can do a lot of kind of that that early stage document management.

09:06

Stuff and then firms are finding that they, as they evolve, it makes sense to marry a platform together, you know, using a practise management systemlike a Clio and then you enhance it with a document management system like net documents.

09:18

And in today, you know, in today’s day, we’re really seeing that there’s sort of that next shift.

09:25

And where once it was cloud computing, now it’s really generative AI and you know, where firms are already saving their documents into their document management system.

09:36

You know, the, the most natural place for AI actions to take place, you know, are where they’ve already got all of their content.

09:46

And so, you know, we, we’ve got a few AI tools that are just really incredible and really changing the way that legal professionals do work.

09:56

And it’s a journey.

09:57

I think you, you would know this for sure being, you know, on the, the, the, the journalism side of this industry.

10:04

It’s something that, you know, came in with a really big.

10:06

We got to figure out, you know, the way to make it really super work in a way that makes a tonne of sense.

10:13

But we’re solving that problem every day and just seeing results that are incredible.

10:20

So, yeah, yeah.

10:22

And it’s a great story.

10:23

And I want to kind of come to my next question around mission, but I also want to refer to just build on what you’re saying regarding the cloud because we’ve had Jack Newton, CEO of Clio, many people know, come onto the show a few times and one of his interviews.

10:36

With us was talking around cloud adoption to your point and how actually that took nearly 10 to 15 years for law firms to move away from the ideology of sort of bricks and mortar law firms to putting things in the cloud.

10:48

And actually Fast forward to modern times and the AI revolution, you know, we’re actually seeing a change and, and Jack in the analysis and what they’re seeing is actually I think from the latest legal trends report of 2024 that as of last year 2020, 319% of league professionals wanted to use or engaging with.

11:06

AI today that’s nearly up to nearly 7980%.

11:09

So you know the the AI is very much here and organisations and lawyers and law firms that really get their head around this and can utilise these withonly going to be a benefit.

11:19

But I want to talk about mission because mission obviously clear have a mission to transform the legal experience for all We support that.

11:25

That’s why we partner with them.

11:26

What’s netdocs mission you’ve talked about the pain points at solving what’s the overall mission of net documents and what is it trying to achieve Yeah.

11:34

So we always talk about how you know.

11:36

Documents we help legal professionals do their best work, right.

11:40

So it’s at our core, you know, we want to be able to provide a platform from which our customers, our users are able to be as efficient as possible that they’re able to, you know, be as secure as possible, as safe as possible, you know, but but also that they can, you know.

12:04

Really, you know, find or use technology that that progresses their business forward from, from a, a, a business perspective, you know, technology that doesn’t get in the way, but enhances, you know.

12:16

The way that they’re working.

12:17

So, you know, we always talk about, you know, helping legal professionals do their best work whenever we’re considering, you know, whether.

12:26

A, you know, we should take a, some sort of strategic path, you know, acquire a certain piece of technology, you know, do this or that.

12:32

We always fall back on on sort of that mission.

12:35

And and of course, you know, our strategic anchors to, you know, just to make sure, you know, things like cloud first, cloud only for us, you know, it’s seems simple.

12:45

In the earlier days, it was something that, you know, was pretty, it was a little trickier to stand by.

12:52

You know, we, there are stories, some of the biggest firms in the world who, you know, in the early 2000s, you know, maybe early 2010 said, Hey, we love net documents, technology.

13:03

We just want to have it on premise instead of in the cloud.

13:05

And, and, you know, they had to make a decision to say, you know what, who are we, you know, and what are we going to be?

13:11

And, and for, for us, it was cloud first, cloud only, which is one of our strategic.

13:15

That sort of support, that helping legal professionals do their best work.

13:19

And so, you know, it’s, it’s one of those things that has helped sort of guide us to where we are.

13:26

And we continue to stick by those things.

13:29

Yeah.

13:29

And I love that and I love the mission in terms of doing your best work.

13:32

And I guess let’s go a bit deeper then, because people are like, right, OK, Kayden, we get it.

13:35

So you’re all around documents, you know, that that makes sense.

13:38

But you’ve got some really smart solutions that you’re offering in terms of organise, protect, plan, deliver, learn.

13:46

Max, so would you mind just telling us a little bit more about some of these solutions and what it may do in terms of actually, you know, daily helping a lawyer’s life do them work better?

13:55

Yeah, yeah, of course.

13:56

So it’s it’s, you know, document management at its core in itself is something that is just so, so incredibly useful.

14:04

You know, little things like, you know, being able to perform really, really advanced searches both on, you know, not just titles of documents, but, you know, keywords within documents.

14:16

You know, a built in behind the scenes OCR engine that makes everything full text searchable.

14:21

So, you know, even if if you’ve got a picture of something that gets uploaded, you need to be able to find that to be able to search there. e-mail filing tools, you know, e-mail management is one of those things that can be such a pain for, you know, legal professionals, right?

14:36

But also so important for firms.

14:38

You know, the amount of times we’ve heard stories where you know, there’s a firm that comes to us and says, look, you know, we’ve got a team of 50 people.

14:47

We had a couple people who were really managing the certain matter, the certain case they, you know, were emailing, but of course the client, they were keeping track of everything.

14:56

They’ve left the firm.

14:57

Now we need to go in and dissect, you know, what was happening in this matter before, you know, before they took off.

15:03

And, and from a governance perspective, being able to have a tool that makes putting those emails into a central repository with the rest of your documents as easy as possible is so crucial so.

15:15

You know, and it documents has a tool that does, you know, uses artificial intelligence to predict.

15:21

Which matter any given e-mail that you receive or are going to send might belong to.

15:26

So with one click, you’re filing a copy of that e-mail.

15:29

You know, that way, you know, maybe you’re overseeing a matter, you’re not the one directly communicating with the client.

15:34

You’re able to go to the matter and see, OK, here’s all my documents, here’s all the emails, here’s everything I need to know.

15:40

So from a governance and continuity perspective, you got it all there.

15:44

And then there’s, you know, sort of the above and beyond document management.

15:47

So we, I think pretty notably a, a couple of years.

15:51

Ago we released a tool called Pattern Builder which is a no code document automation platform and so being able to build complex workflows that are not.

16:05

Aren’t going to be the same for every single firm, right That in fact, they’re never the same, you know to be able to use.

16:13

Again, trying to support some of those smaller firms without large IT teams.

16:17

Hey, here’s a here’s a tool in which you can build applications.

16:20

That work for your firm so build a client facing form they fill out all their information and then documents are automatically created for you you know based specifically on what you need right that really propelled us into being able to offer a really a really fantastic AI module, which is what we call pattern builder Max so being able to take those workflows that anybody can create you know they can create these apps we call them but then infuse.

16:51

AI prompts into them, you know, so that right, you know, from where all of your documents already live.

16:56

If you have really specific AI use cases, we’re able to create those apps or you’re able to create them yourself and then use AI in a way that you’re not trying to piece together, You know, different, you know, AI tools that kind of give you, you know, certain outputs that are kind of, you know, very, very generic or the same for everything, but, you know, really specific to the type of work you’re doing.

17:20

But because it’s a document automation tool as well, it can create documents based on, you know, some of those AI needs that you have.

17:26

And so, you know, we, we’ve really gone down the, the, the approach of don’t buy individual AI tools that, you know, a vendor may create and give you to say, hey, here’s a, here’s a summarization tool, right?

17:41

Every firm likes their summaries, you know, a little bit differently than the others.

17:45

And so here’s a tool where you can create a summarization app that says, I need a summary.

17:50

And I need it to include these 10 things every single time.

17:54

And I need you to check for this and this and this because that’s what we care about.

17:57

And then I need you to produce it onto a document with our letterhead and the styling, the format that we care about, et cetera, and go from there.

18:06

And so it’s been really awesome.

18:08

And we have customers who they have users who will go to their sort of administrative teams, whoever looks after net documents in the morning and say, I need an AI app that can do X.

18:20

They can build it themselves and they’re deploying it in the afternoon for testing, for, for checking and so.

18:25

It’s allowing our customers to sort of have, you know, the ability to access a full range of AI capabilities without purchasing, you know, 20 different tools to do each of those things.

18:39

And then most recently, we’ve released a, an assistant tool.

18:43

And so you know, you’re, you’re where your documents are.

18:45

You select a few documents and you just begin having a conversation.

18:48

You know what?

18:51

You know what within these documents you know may contain X or this or that, right?

18:58

Umm, you know, pull me a list of, you know, timelines from all of these, you know, 50 emails that are on this matter, you know, in a way that I can digest it really easily.

19:08

So some of those things that allow people to get quick answers.

19:11

I mean, right before we started this, we have a, a, a prospective customer who’s looking to move to net documents from our main competitor.

19:18

And they were curious about whether, you know, they would have a period of time after they cancelled to still access their system in case, you know, we still need to migrate.

19:28

It’s over things and, and we were sort of, you know, thinking about it and I said, you know what, I’ve got a copy of their service agreement, their standard 1.

19:35

And I went in and just asked net documents using this new assistant tool.

19:40

And sure enough, I had the clause, the exact wording from within the contract that said, yeah, they have 90 days post cancellation to still access, use, etcetera, to, to do a migration.

19:50

And that was the answer we needed.

19:51

And instead of, you know, going in and diving and trying to find answers to things, we’re, we’re able to just surface that information.

19:58

So much faster now.

19:59

Yeah.

20:00

And not sit, isn’t it?

20:00

And it’s efficiency.

20:01

And I want to talk about that in a moment, but I want to kind of switch a little bit to just the art of selling within the legal profession because, you know, I see selling as serving.

20:11

And I think it’s a service.

20:12

And I think it’s, when done well, a beautiful art.

20:16

But from your many years of, you know, working in legal tech and with lawyers and law firms, what do you think of some of the things potentially, if they are in a sales focused role within the league profession, they should be thinking about?

20:28

Your observations in terms of how best to to sell, Yeah, it’s a great question.

20:34

You know, I think that the number one thing to keep in mind from a legal perspective is that often those that are making decisions on behalf of the firm are making, you know, business decisions when it’s not there.

20:48

And making those businesses decisions isn’t their number one, you know, day-to-day work, right.

20:54

These are partners who have, you know.

20:57

You know, very, very full Diaries of things to be doing from a, a, a legal work perspective and so.

21:03

You have to be willing to understand that in the legal world, and especially in law firms, it’s a little different when you’re dealing with corporate legal departments where they might have, you know, specific teams and from a procurement perspective, etcetera.

21:15

But these are the individuals who are actually, you know, driving revenue for their firm and purchasing software and answering your calls and, you know, doing things, you know.

21:30

That way is is is a lot of the times that it ends up being sort of secondary.

21:36

But understanding that, you know, sort of dynamic, it can really be an advantage to say, you know what, I’m going to dive in with you here and, and we’re going to determine because you know, you know for sure whether something is going to help you do better work or not.

21:52

And you know, being able to jump in and say, you know, let’s let’s find that return on investment for you.

21:58

And if it’s not there, then it won’t make sense for us or for you to sort of continue this conversation, wasting your time, etcetera.

22:05

And we’re in a non sort of legal world of selling.

22:09

You’re often doing that with sort of a removed third party entity whose job it is to help procure, you know, different tools in the legal world.

22:17

And especially in the smaller end of, you know, the legal world, you know, you’re able to have those conversations with people who actually know, you know, what helps them, like what would help them, where their challenges are.

22:29

And so.

22:30

It’s been my experience to to sort of take the approach of we need to be patient because this is not the the number one thing they want to be doing.

22:40

And when you’ve got them, you know, maximise that, that time with them to, you know, not just, you know, throw fluff at them or whatever, you know, you may do, but dive into the, the real impact of how it’s going to impact their, you know, their business and their ability to do work.

22:56

And when you do that, you know, you can, you can, you can accomplish a lot in a shorter period of time.

23:03

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23:51

Now back to the show.

23:52

We’re trying to be as client centred as possible and I always talk about WIFM, what’s in it for me and really thinking of putting yourselves in the shoes of the other person and how it’s going to really benefit them and understand their world.

24:03

So I love that perspective and, and, and how you approach things.

24:06

We talked a little bit about efficiency and productivity.

24:09

So I’m just wondering if there’s a particular success story that stands out to you in terms of, you know, that boosting productivity for league professionals.

24:17

Is there a success story of where a law firm has seen this improvement and efficiency through using that document she’d like share?

24:23

You know, I can think of especially the culture.

24:28

If we look at the UK market a little bit specifically, you know, the UK legal market is a little different to a lot of other places in that there are often, you know, the firms that do everything.

24:39

We’ll have a large portion of the firm that do things like, you know, conveyancing or family law, you know, things that are a little bit more straightforward, a little bit more standardised. And often there are tools created that really, really cater to those types of workflows, right.

24:57

And, and the interesting thing is that they’re often, you know, within those same firms, a whole half of or a section of the firm who are also doing, you know, more of the.

25:08

You know, the, the, the more bespoke type of legal work, I would say right.

25:12

It’s it’s you’re, you know, you’re litigators, those that are doing corporate work or M and a work.

25:17

You know, it’s different every time.

25:18

It’s not, you know, we’re not following the exact process so much.

25:21

And, and what you see a lot of the time is that, you know, in the spirit of being able to purchase a technology that supports that transactional side, you know, the conveyancing side or things like that, especially you find that a lot of users end up being, you know, put into situations where they’re using tools.

25:40

That don’t cater really specifically to their needs.

25:42

And so from a net documents perspective, you know, being a document management system that integrates really well with, you know, their practise or case management systems that, you know, that are sort of available.

25:53

Market we’ve seen especially over the last couple of years this revolution where you know those firms can you know put net documents in as the document repository those that do conveyancing or do family work or do work that’s very transactional it’s kind of the same every time they sort of continue working from within their practise management system primarily but you’re able to unlock this world for those who.

26:19

You know, those who do more of the bespoke work and and still have sort of one platform.

26:25

That’s been a sort of a consistent theme over the last couple of years.

26:28

Like, you know, instead of having one tool, let’s have a best of breed platform that feels like one tool but but isn’t.

26:35

And you know, we’re seeing a load of that.

26:38

And then there are little things like, you know, even if you look at the AI side, we have a customer who just shared, you know, they do.

26:47

And I may have shared this when we got together at the the Clio event that they do really high level.

26:54

These applications for, you know, folks who are trying to move country for, you know, doing work especially and being able to create an AI app that says take a look at here are all the successful ones we’ve done in the past.

27:10

The client fills out a form that, you know, gives them all the information about them, specifically their, their strengths, their weaknesses, things like that.

27:18

Marry these things together to create a, an application that you know is going to be most likely.

27:24

To be successful, what once was, you know, a work of just, you know, picking pieces from old things, placing them into the new manually entering information from the application that you’re sort of currently working on and doing that all manually is now something that can just be done automatically, right?

27:44

And that’s where, you know, the world is heading.

27:46

You know, we’re not, I think that the best firms are finding, you know, AI isn’t going to.

27:52

You know, come up with everything for that.

27:55

But, and if it does, it’s often not going to be the best, but can we leverage the really good work you’ve already done, you know, so that we don’t, you know, make the, the, the, the work of law become so robotic that it’s the same across the board, but that we can just leverage that, that really, really good stuff that your firm specifically have done that make you special, make you unique a lot faster than maybe we used to be able to do.

28:19

And it’s been a really exciting time to see things, you know, especially like that where it’s.

28:25

It’s.

28:25

You know what, we had this information all along.

28:28

We just didn’t have a way to be able to go find it really quickly and create new work from that old work.

28:34

And that’s been another recent thing.

28:38

Yeah.

28:38

And like you say, I get excited when I talk about tech for good.

28:42

And you mentioned there the the Clio event that we we recently did together, which was at the the iconic Canada House very near Trafalgar Square in, in London.

28:51

Brilliant event.

28:51

You’re on the panel along with previous guests we’ve had on the show.

28:55

Ronnie Gurion and Donna Denise Smith.

28:58

So we explore during that panel discussion the sort of future of legal technology.

29:02

So are there any other other takeaways or insights from that event, particularly that you would like to share with our audience from your perspective?

29:09

Yeah.

29:10

I mean, I think that, you know, Peers appears.

29:14

Lammy, Piers Lanny.

29:16

Yeah.

29:16

He’s also been a former guest on the show.

29:17

Yeah.

29:18

BBC Dragons den investor and previous lawyer.

29:20

Yep.

29:20

Yeah.

29:20

So.

29:20

So Piers Pierce shared.

29:23

He said something like.

29:27

You know that the AI is not going to replace lawyers, but lawyers who use AI will replace lawyers who don’t.

29:33

Yeah.

29:33

And I think that what we’re really seeing, what we’re really feeling is this once in a lifetime evolutionary period in which the world really is changing.

29:43

And you know, it’s not the answer to every problem right now today.

29:48

It’s not there yet, right?

29:51

But you can tell the direction that it’s heading.

29:53

And it’s one of those things where I think that we’re seeing a shift in that there are some firms who are taking a pretty.

30:02

Hard stance against.

30:03

To say, you know what, like we this is how we’ve always done things.

30:07

It’s worked really, really well for us.

30:09

We’ve done fantastic work for, you know, in some case, you know, 5070 a hundred years right within the firm.

30:17

And you know, we’re not going to, you know, throw that all away, right?

30:21

And you’re seeing some firms who are are really jumping in and embracing it.

30:26

And I think that the general consensus both at the, you know, the event that we had that Canada House, but also in.

30:33

In other conversations that I’ve been able to be a part of, you know, especially over the last year or so, is that it is, it’s not going away and we need to really jump in and embrace it and find the good in it.

30:46

You know, find ways like I mentioned there not to not, not that the AI replaces the work that we do, but it enhances it.

30:54

You know, we can still, there’s still an art to practising law.

30:58

How can we use AI to just make that art easier to access and easier to create?

31:04

And, you know, make it something that, you know, it’s just not got so much, you know, barrier to, to to, to, to get after and use.

31:14

And so I think that that was, you know, my main take away walking away.

31:18

It’s just, you know, these, these tech providers, Clio is, is a, is a really fantastic example.

31:24

You know, the cloud evolution was, was something that an organisation like Cliowas at the very forefront of, right.

31:32

And I can only imagine the types of conversations they would have had in the early days with firms saying, hey, we’re taking everything, we’re putting it in the cloud, you’ll get it in the Internet.

31:40

And they would have gotten some pushback for sure.

31:43

And, and there were firms who embraced it.

31:46

And those firms are doing better today than, than the alternative, right?

31:50

And, and you can see, you know, even at Clio, you know, the, the incredible growth that they’ve seen over the last 5678 years.

31:59

You know, even those firms that maybe were the stragglers to adopting that sort of first round of, of, of cloud technology, they’ve all done it now, right?

32:07

Like everyone’s kind of done it now.

32:09

Is going to be the same way.

32:11

And and I think that that’s, you know, the consensus that we’re seeing it’s you’re going to you’re going to use it at some point and you might as well get out ahead while it’s a real competitive advantage because there will come a day, I really believe that it is table stakes, right?

32:27

It is it’s there and it will be cheap and easy to use and you know, use the advantage walls there.

32:36

Yeah, and a great take away as well.

32:38

And I think it’s I’ll probably butcher this quote from from from Jack that he also said at that event around sort of AI see it as a legal workforce multiplier.

32:47

You know, in terms of the ability that it can do to help you really, you know, be better at your job, be more efficient, get more client centred, look at the strategic side, build those relationships.

32:57

You touched on it there around challenges in adoption.

33:01

And I want to to kind of go deep on this because I still think there is a slight aversion from some law firms in terms of adopting new technologies, whatever reason it may be, may be due to workload being very hell bent on using a legacy system.

33:14

So what are some of the common challenges when law firms?

33:17

Transition to cloud based platforms like net documents and, and how can they potentially think about overcoming those Yeah, it’s a great question and and you know we often I think that the default thought is you know what lawyers are they’re just averse to change right When you dig deeper though, and I even think about in my normal day-to-day life right you get a new car and this new car is so much nicer than your old car but you know you don’t remember whether you know you if you need to move your seat forward or backward is that you know you.

33:48

Front or you go to the side and like, that’s frustrating for a period of time, right?

33:51

And when you’re so used to doing something all the time a certain way, even if it’s not the best way, it’s it’s just hard sometimes to, you know, to sort of retrain your brain on those things.

34:03

And so there are firms who you know, recognise this, understandthat, you know, even though the technology is, is very obviously better.

34:13

These are individuals who still need to be sold on on that right.

34:16

And and so I think that.

34:18

You know, back to, you know, sort of looping everything around from a sales perspective, I think it makes a tonne of sense for organisations that are making changes to get out early and really find ways to sell the benefits that are coming, right?

34:32

Get people excited about the things that they’re going to be able to do even before it’s it’s deployed to them, right?

34:39

Find ways to, you know, really use like there’s the old, you know, carrot versus the stick analogy.

34:44

You know, there comes a time at some points where you might have to employ the stick.

34:48

Say like, you know what, well, this is how we’re going to do things.

34:51

So so you got to figure it out, but that should never come before copious amounts of carrot, right?

34:56

Look at this, you know, amazing functionality you’re going to be able to have from there.

35:02

Once you start actually deploying tech, we find that if you can get a few people on board, especially if you’ve got influential people who are willing to, you know, to to really buy in and become your sort of super users.

35:16

Getting those peer advocates.

35:19

For the the different technologies that you’re rolling out really can go a long way.

35:24

I even think in my, my day-to-day use of technology working at net documents, you know, we’ve, we’ve rolled out new tools for helping us do our work that are, you know, they are objectively better than, you know, than the tools we had before.

35:38

But I didn’t love them because it wasn’t the way I was used to working And having those that do the same work that I do, you know, be able to say, look, I don’t have that much skin in the game here because I’m not your boss and.

35:50

You know, I’m not the one who’s who’s, you know, purchased this technology for us, but I’m able to do this and this and this that I couldn’t do before.

35:57

And I’m sure you do that too.

35:59

And it’s been a real game changer for me.

36:02

Just goes such a long way, right?

36:05

And from there I would say like, you know, don’t, don’t a lot of firms will, you know, in the spirit of cutting costs, you know, go out of their way to, you know, the one of the first things that we always see get cut is, you know, training, right?

36:19

Hire professionals that have done this a lot of times to come in, hold your users hands, you walk them through, you know, you know how to accomplish those tasks.

36:29

It’s incredible the amount of times that we find, you know, a user decides they don’t like a system, right?

36:36

I just, I don’t like it.

36:36

I’ve tried it, I don’t like it.

36:38

And it’s often because they feel like they can’t do something when in reality they could have done it and even easier than they could do it before.

36:44

They just didn’t know how to do it because you don’t cover every tiny little thing.

36:49

On a general one to many type of training programme, so get people in to sit down, hold their hands, sit with them while they navigate through new tools or technology.

36:59

If you’ve got internal people who can do that, great.

37:02

If you don’t find people who can and I think that you can, you can really go a long way and sort of employing those things.

37:13

Yeah, absolutely.

37:14

And and I love that you gave somebody sort of practical examples there and I guess moving forwards then.

37:19

Just before we look to to close a couple of sort of quick fire questions.

37:22

It may not be quick fire responses, but in terms of your role as Director of obviously inside sales for a mere, it’s a big region.

37:28

So what unique trends or challenges do you see in the legal tech space, particularly across sort of Europe, Middle East and Africa?

37:35

And are there any differentiators from region to region in terms of adoption of legal technology?

37:41

Yeah, yeah, I mean it is.

37:44

It’s really interesting, you know, coming from the US, which is, you know, a bigger market.

37:48

But being one country, you know, there’s sort of that, you know, ability if you can, you know, if it works for one place, you might be thousands of miles away, but it’ll work for you too.

37:58

You know, country to country.

38:00

There are just, you know, way different needs right in, in Europe, right.

38:05

And so you know, both from like a, a GDPR perspective that you often come across, but even from a user perspective, you know, there are language.

38:14

You know, situations that come up from time to time.

38:17

You know, there are workflow perspectives that are different from place to place and so it’s been a really fun, you know, an interesting challenge working in the European, you know, market Europe, Middle East and Africa as well, just because every little place is its own.

38:35

You know, you kind of have to start over in a lot of cases and really figure out what what matters, but you start to see little pockets of places that.

38:44

Really start to take steps you know, forward a little faster.

38:47

For example, the Nordic region right now.

38:50

Is so much hotter with AI things than than a lot of the other places.

38:55

And so, you know, you’re able to use learnings from some of those earlier adopters to help, you know, prod along those those countries or those regions that take a little bit more time.

39:05

Yeah, no, Graham, thanks for for sharing such interesting insights.

39:08

And I guess one one final question before we look to close is looking to the future.

39:12

And it is hard to predict.

39:13

And you know, everyone sort of says, particularly in the world we live in now, it really is hard day-to-day to predict what’s going to happen.

39:19

But can you?

39:19

You share sort of future plans for net documents and any future developments you’re excited about.

39:25

Yeah.

39:26

So I think that the next wave of enhancement is going to include a couple things. 1 is a semantic search offering, so being able to have conversations with your entire historic database, right.

39:41

Have we ever argued this before?

39:43

Have we ever done work?

39:45

Like this, you know, how are we doing in this matter?

39:49

You know, does it, does it feel like we’re, maybe it’s a litigation?

39:52

Are we winning or losing here?

39:54

Based on all the information that’s within the system, that’s one.

39:59

And then the other, I would say, is around what we’re calling background processes.

40:04

So using AI to intelligently identify things like you save a document, AI automatically understands everything about this document and and can therefore trigger actions to happen.

40:18

So I save a contract into the system on behalf of my client.

40:23

The system automatically recognises the contract, runs it against a playbook that you’ve created to say these are the things we care about for these kinds of contracts.

40:31

And before you do anything, you’ve already got a list of suggestions of places that you might want to, you know, make changes or double click based on the things you care about.

40:41

So it’s all about, you know, right now, I think the AI world is very much like, go and do this one specific thing for me, right?

40:49

And I think the future is how do we sort of create a base of here are the things that we like to do.

40:56

I don’t want to have to tell you to do it every time.

40:58

I want you to do it for me and you know.

41:01

That’s where, you know, in the very near future we’re we’re, you know, net documents is aiming to be, you know, let’s just start to get a little bit even more efficient than you can be right now.

41:14

Yeah.

41:14

And we’re all for that in terms of let’s increase that efficiency as much as possible.

41:18

And, you know, it has a knock on effect in terms of, you know, overall well-being job satisfaction, not getting stuck in the weeds, you know, having to do a lot of these tasks that for years and years have needed to be done.

41:28

There’s been an absolute brilliant episode, Kate, and really enjoyed learning about your personal story, all the great things Net Documents is doing, and I’m sure our listeners are going to want to know more.

41:36

So with that in mind, where can they go to learn more about your career or Net Documents?

41:41

Feel free to shout out any websites, any social media handles will also include them with this episode for you too.

41:46

Yeah, yeah, of course.

41:47

So, I mean, it’s more the standard ones on LinkedIn.

41:51

Kaden Smith, I think you probably put in Kaden Smith net documents and I’ll pop up and then netdocuments.

41:57

com, there’s a, you know, get a demo button that you can click and we can have a conversation and, you know, at least show you sort of what other firms are doing.

42:08

Yeah, absolutely.

42:09

Well, it just leads me to say thanks so much once again.

42:11

It’s been absolute pleasure hosting you today on the Legalese Being podcast sponsored by Clio.

42:15

Wishing you lots of continued success with your career and indeed everything you’re getting up to at Net Documents.

42:20

But from all of us for now, over and out.

42:22

Thank you for listening to this week’s episode.

42:25

If you like the content here, why not check out our world leading content and collaboration hub?

42:31

That legally speaking club over on Discord goes to our website www.

42:37

www.legallyspeakingpodcast.com

42:39

for the link to join our community there.

42:42

Over and out.