On today’s legally speaking podcast, I’m delighted to be joined by Martin O’Malley. Martin is the CEO of Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory Division. He has more than 20 years of experience in operation, sales, customer support, product development and marketing. Martin has led businesses across Europe, the US, Asia, Pacific, and has extensive international experience.

So why should you be listening in? 

You can hear Rob and Martin discussing:

– The Exploration of AI’s Transformative Potential and its Importance

– Quality and Trust in AI Solutions

– Challenges of AI Adoption

– Not Just Implementing Technology, But Helping Professionals Change Their Work Processes

– The Future of Legal Work

Connect with Martin here – https://nl.linkedin.com/in/martinomalley

Transcript

Martin O’Malley  0:00  

I think we should bear in mind that most lawyers don’t care about the technology. They care about what the technology does for them. If you start off with the premise of the solution is delivering the quality of talk about it’s secure. It’s not violating privacy. That has to be given. The critical thing from there is identifying. How do your processes, your internal processes need to change? How do you actually educate and actually change the way in which you work? Part of our expert solution strategy is domain knowledge combined with technology to ultimately help our customers be productive?

Robert Hanna  0:35  

On today’s legally speaking podcast, I’m delighted to be joined by Martin O’Malley. Martin is the CEO of Wolters Kluwer legal and regulatory Division. He has more than 20 years of experience in operation, sales, customer support, product development and marketing. Martin has led businesses across Europe, the US, Asia, Pacific, and has extensive international experience. So a very big, warm welcome to the show. Martin.

Martin O’Malley  0:58  

Thank you, Rob, thanks for having me. 

Robert Hanna  1:01  

Oh, it’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the show today. And before we dive into all the great work that you are doing, we do have a customary icebreaker question here on the legally speaking podcast, which is on the scale of one to 10, with 10 being very real, what would you rate the hit TV series suits in terms of its reality of the law? If you’ve seen it?

Martin O’Malley  1:21  

Yeah, I have to say, I do confess to having seen some of the earlier episodes, but I’m not a lawyer by background, so I haven’t really been looking at to that lens, but I asked my wife, and she said she would give Harvey a nine.

Robert Hanna  1:32  

There we go. Well, that’s very high praise for Harvey. 

Martin O’Malley  1:36  

Very high praise for Harvey’s legal skills, of course, absolutely.

Robert Hanna  1:41  

Absolutely, so let’s get back to you then, Martin, as we move swiftly on, would you mind telling our listeners bit about your background and career journey?

Martin O’Malley  1:47  

Yeah. So I grew up at the west of Ireland, so I’ve spent exactly half my life I realised in the west of Ireland, studied engineering, and I started my career at relics, at the elsephere piece of relics, first in operations, but I’ve been very fortunate to kind of move through different functions in the company, so operations, product management, marketing and sales, through to unit leadership. And I started at that very interesting point, which was the whole printed digital migration, seems like a long time ago. And in addition to the fact that I had multiple functions, I’ve also been very lucky that I started in Ireland, I worked in the UK, moved to Amsterdam, and from there, I was sent to both Singapore and the US. So I’ve kind of had international exposure. I moved to waterscure in 2017 and started out as the MD for the Benelux for legal and regulatory in May of 2020 in the middle of COVID, I actually became the CEO, and I currently run the division. It’s about nine, 50 million euros turnover. We operate in multiple countries across Europe, the US, China and India. And I was really drawn to it because of its purpose. What school purpose, which is deep impact on what matters most. And it’s this idea that we help our clients to be impactful, but also that we also indirectly have an impact in society as we operate in so that’s a that was a very powerful thing, and it still motivates me today.

Robert Hanna  3:19  

Yeah, absolutely. And we love having those voices on the show that really are inspired to to make a real impact. Just thinking back to James Thornton, who’s one of the leading climate change legal professionals in the world, and some great conversations we’ve had. But congratulations on becoming the CEO, and I know you’re doing some fantastic work from your side. Could you perhaps give us a bit of a day in the life of a CEO at Wolters? Kluwer?

Martin O’Malley  3:40  

Yeah. I mean, it’s, you know, if you run a division at waterscour, we kind of work on a certain cadence, and if you zoom out, it’s like a three year plan, which gets translated into your yearly budget. And then it’s basically, you know, monthly reporting, where you’re kind of looking at it from an internal perspective, how’s the business developing, but a big part of that is also looking at what we’re doing with our customers and what is true. Has this mission, which is focused on what we call basically transforming our business towards expert solutions, where we combine our expertise or the main knowledge of certain segments, in my case, legal and registry, so the legal professionals with technology, where content and data to help our customers be more effective. So I would say in all of our internal meetings, there’s always a kind of an element of what we’re doing for customers. We spend a lot of time looking at things like net promoter scores, but also how that’s translating into business levels. So you always kind of totally between those two, and sandwich between that, obviously, is focused on employees. We have a very strong focus on culture. And culture is really, you know, I translate that into how good do we feel as employees at waterscore, so measure our engagement scores every year, because I have a very strong belief in happy. Customer happy employees translated customers, and that’s kind of your financial results are now come off the two things you do for one of your employees, and secondly, for your customers, so their outcomes rather than just an objective in itself.

Robert Hanna  5:14  

And I love that, and I always say to people with my legal recruiting hat on, don’t just hire people for a job. You know, get people to really buy into the mission and feel they contribute to the mission, and they have a real purpose as part of that, rather than just coming to the do nine to five every day and just have a job. And obviously you’re doing a great job of that. Now, you didn’t think we could get away with this podcast without talking about that little thing called AI? Did you Martin? So you know, we’ve got listeners of all sorts of levels of AI. You know, some very, very, very highly advanced, some obviously just dipping their toe in, and some curious. So let’s start at sort of the simple level to begin with. What’s your definition of Gen AI, and with, obviously a number of months since its arrival, what’s the current state of adoption for the legal market for 2025 in your in your view?

Martin O’Malley  5:58  

Yeah, I think there’s probably a few different pieces to that. So that’s why we break it out. I think Gen AI obviously has had a huge impact in a relatively short period of time of just kind of getting the general interest in AI. You know, if I sit at the table with my kids, I talk about AI to the point of where they say, it’s boring. But I think if you kind of zoom out and you look at AI, from what’s your perspective, you know, we’ve been deploying AI for multiple years before genai came along, we’ve got multiple solutions in the marketplace that actually uses AI. I think about 50% of our revenue have some AI built in. But for us, the driver has been really when we look at AI, we look at how can it help demonstrably impact customers, and there are principles we apply there which are really focused on delivering the highest level of accuracy of our customers where we’re taking I think two things we look at. One is how we combine human expertise and validated content with AI capabilities to ensure that you can deliver something that’s of a high quality level, and quality translates into it does what customers expect, but it also operates on in a secure and private manner. I think those are things that are important for us as a company, but also for our customers, and at the same time, provides the transparent transparency to our clients, that the results they see, they can trace them, and that they’re validated. So I think that’s a very important piece. Now, if you look at where we are today in that journey, there is huge interest. I just come back from a trip from China last week where I met law firms. I was talking to corporate lawyers and but also at government level. And the conversations I was having, there were some conversations I have in the Netherlands or in any of the markets we operate in, and they typically hang around things like, you know, what can ai do to help my improve my productivity? How can I do it in a safe way? How can I be assured that quality is is that is come from. And I think they’re looking to parties like water stewards actually deliver on that. So it’s a very exciting time, because it’s, it’s not just about the technology. Ai, at the end of the day, is just the technology. Whether it’s Gen AI or other forms of technology, they are only a means to an end. And the end is, I think, for our customers, is, how can we help your customers be more productive? So I think that is really the key focus, and that’s where, frankly, the way we look at it across our business, it’s part of our expert solution strategy, which is domain knowledge combined with technology to ultimately help our customers be more productive. Yeah,

Robert Hanna  8:40  

absolutely. And I think another big part, and from the conversations we’ve been having on the show, is obviously AI coupled with pi, the people intelligence as well, you can go out and buy all these amazing pieces of technology without getting the people on board and educated and seeing the value. And I guess is that you talk very clearly there about the benefits to the customers. Is there, is there one that you seem time and time again? Because, you know, let’s be real. You know, Wolter’s career has been at the forefront of integrating AI for a long time. It’s only really been sort of table stakes in the last couple of years or so in terms of the mainstream. But you know, from over the years of sort of customers responding to you regarding Gen AI, is there sort of a core key theme benefit for those that might be less like at that stage, at the moment, in terms of thinking about buying that you’d really want to kind

Martin O’Malley  9:24  

of hammer home? Yeah, I think there’s the way we think about this, if you kind of take a step back and you look at it from the customer’s perspective and the bigger trends, and particularly for legal professions. But I think if you take all the professions that we serve as an office who are some of the same principles apply for legal and regulatory professionals, whether you’re a corporate lawyer or whatever, in a law firm or working quite a legal in the legal profession for government, you have a increasing volume of regulatory requirements that they have to comply with in a decreasing amount of time. So what our customers are looking for, we our solution. To help them actually be more productive. Believe that in a way for safeguards policy, and we look at it in a number of ways. So if you look at my portfolio, that the products we serve, broadly speaking, about 70% of the business is digital content. So research content, 30% of software. So when we look at the research comes in. It’s really looking at, how can we help the improve the discoverability for clients? So typically, a corporate lawyer is looking at precedent. Sorry, a law firm lawyers looking at precedent. Corporate lawyer might be looking at what regulatory changes are. How do they affect my business and but essentially, what they’re doing is they’re doing document search. They want to find a specific, specific piece of information. Sometimes they know in advance what they’re looking for. They just want to get a compliment. And what we’re doing there essentially is, you know, we’re implementing AI in a way that helps them get more effectively talk to those documents. It’s sometimes via conversational search. Instead of keyword search, you’re looking at summarization capabilities. You’re looking in some cases where translation services are being built in. That’s obviously very easy with J AI, but the key focus is on helping them get more quickly to developing their information. That’s one use case, the other use case that we see under multiple by the way. So I’m just going to pick a couple of examples and examples. But if you look at, for example, in legislave, which is a Contract Lifecycle Management product there, we’ve been using AI, not Gen AI, by the way, that’s more, actually, I would say traditional AI, to search through contracts and extract relevant details from contracts. So, you know, I mentioned I started in the COVID period, and what was one of the most sought after. So for questions at that period was, I’ve got leases in my buildings, whether those leases up for renewal, so that I can make sure at the time I have a renewal if I’m going to shrink my amount of office space, because I’m now going to hybrid working, so that type of that’s high value information at that point, in terms of, you know, major corporations that have lots of different locations, how we get very quickly to where you have opportunities potentially save costs and actually have a business. So that’s, I would say, you know, examples in on the software and the content side. But the other area that we see at the moment as being very exciting is where you have, on one hand, research products, like in front of our content products, where it’s coming more closer to the workspace of the client, and you know, we call that the legal workspace, where you’re looking at internal information, sometimes client specific information, or the clients or the client information. And increasingly, our customers are looking just saying, Okay, I’m working with third parties. Might be a Harvey. Might be an agora. It might be Microsoft. How can we take what you bring to the table, bring it closer to internal information, and that’s creating some new use cases. And I think the focus there, again, is on efficiency. So document created, due diligence, reviews, data analysis, and at the same time, where sometimes the pivoting between, let’s say, task, donated, work internally, but also using external sources. And I think that’s that’s where you’re going to see a lot of developments over time. But despite the huge interest, what we see is that the pace is going to be very measured. So we try to look at, we try to, in a way, reflect the cautiousness of our clients in adapting AI and technology in general, to the speed at which we bring it to them. So I think that’s a continuous effort in collaboration.

Robert Hanna  13:53  

Yeah, and I love that word collaboration. My listeners will be fed up with me saying it, but collaboration is domination. And I love that you talk to efficiency as well. I think it’s important lesson for anyone. When you’re thinking of rolling out products and keeping your customers at mine, there tends to be three factors, time, quality or cost, where they’ll look to buy or see the value. And you articulated that brilliantly there in terms of those efficiency gains, which is clearly going to free up a lot of time from other tasks. Let’s go back to I think it was about September 2024 where Wolters Kluwer has introduced a new gen I functionality called Vital law. So I think this is the company’s legal research platform. So again, this combines the power of innovation with Wolters Kluwer in depth expertise across 15 practice areas. That’s quite a few. So could you tell us a little bit more about vital law?

Martin O’Malley  14:38  

Ai? Yeah, I think vital AI is probably the first of our research related AI options we brought to the market. In the meantime, we’ve brought it into, frankly, all of our other content products. And it’s not finished. It’s coming the next couple of months, and it’s just an example of what I mentioned, that we are essentially making the. Way in which lawyers in the US search vital a lot easier. So as you said, You’ve got 50 different domain areas and multiple documents. I think what’s often forgotten with a company like waterscure, it’s not that we have just the authenticated content, but we have authenticated content that goes back years and years. So you know, in some of our databases, we lost 200 million records, just to kind of give an example. So what you’re doing, really, what we’re done with Python AI, vital. AI is essentially reply deployed AI in a way where you can more quickly extra relevant information. You may get a list of results coming back from the product, which AI then actually summarises it extracts. I mean, you can basically manipulate it in a way where ultimately it’s getting faster to the relevant piece of information. It’s not more complex than that. I think that’s what often they see. But it’s highly valuable for clients because it translates into time reduction plus, and I think that’s the other thing that is, I would say, differentiates us is it has to deliver a result that’s reliable, so the answer that the customer gets has to have a high quality, and it needs to be secure and comply with privacy regulations and so forth. So we have been very measured in deploying AI interest solutions, quality has been for us more important than students, which is kind of interesting in a market where you see a lot of new players coming in, we see press releases go left, right and centre, in terms of all this exciting stuff, you know, you ask them, of you know, what does my day look like as a CEO, it’s sometimes providing that perspective of lies. You know, we don’t respond to press releases, but we need to keep focus on those. The solutions we deliver to our customers actually ultimately have an impact. And if there is an impact that will translate into, you know, nuclear sales, better, retention levels, upsells, I think that’s where the focus has been, and vital, as I said, was the first product we rolled out on the research side. We’ve taken those learnings now, and we’re deploying it across the rest of our search products across Europe and China.

Robert Hanna  17:11  

And I love that you talk to quality. And again, our listeners probably a little bit bored of me saying this, but I always talk about Jeff Bezos delivering a really interesting piece of insight in terms of in a world of constant change and new things and people being fast out, you need to think about your clients expectations that won’t change. What are the things that won’t change? And in his world, he couldn’t imagine an Amazon where people want to pay more for their products and get them slower. So he’s understanding that his clients behaviours are they’re going to continuously want to get their products faster. They’re going to continuously want to get them at a lower rate cost point, and so focusing on the things that won’t change in that quality aspect, like you say, not just necessarily getting something out because of some breaking news, and sticking to your north star and your mission is what’s going to separate you apart. So thank you for sharing that.

Martin O’Malley  17:53  

Yeah, that’s critical. And I think, I think the other thing that we see is that it’s not just about actually taking the solution to customers. You also have to help them work with it. And one of the things that I think is is underestimated always with technology advancements, is it’s not just about the technology. There’s a change in how people need to work. There has to be, has to happen as well. And so a big part of what we do as small groups, new solutions, not just AI, is to help our customers actually work with them. So I think that focus on guiding them through the change, but also changing their behaviour. That’s critical. Because ultimately, you know, we can make a great selection in terms of the technology investment, but it’s not used. It’s not doing what it should do. And I heard a shocking statistic recently, which is that 50% of law firms, corporate lawyers, are investing, to some extent, at the moment in AI, but only 20% of it is being used effect, and that’s, there’s a huge potential there. And I have heard this time and time again. Also, I heard last week from clients that and you know, you look out there, you know, you sit at the table with the managing partners, and they’re all excited about the eye, and then they take you for a tour on the premises, and you see lawyers sitting between piles of paper. So I think that’s, and I don’t say that in a way to mock lawyers. Absolutely not the case. They’re my customers. But I think it just reflects that there’s still a gap between where the aspirations are and where the practice is, and that’s going to take some time to change. And that’s a human behaviour. I mean, it’s, you know, it’s like we all search with keywords in Google as we as we’ve been kind of doing that for the last 20 years. But I’m finding, if I look at myself just as a user outside book, I use chatgpt because I take a picture and I say, Okay, I’m problem with the watering system in my garden. And. It’s much more effective at helping me than Google, but I have to train myself to make that step every time. And I think it’s the same in law firms, even more complex, because you have boundaries around practice expertise, so people are kind of a bit but territorial about their expertise. So I think there’s a big element of knowledge management and change management here, that’s been underestimation when people think about how AI is going to change the world

Robert Hanna  20:28  

Absolutely. And I feel like you know a lot of what you said, there is, I’m just sitting here nodding. And I also just remember you saying, taking a photo. I remember our washing machine at home was had an e4 39 error or something flashing, and I took a photo of it, and then just went straight to Jack GBT explained this to me, and it was a simple blockage. You open the thing, you take it out, and, you know, you actually get the solution. So, yeah, no, thanks for that. And you touched on, I know we talk a lot about this when it comes to adoption of Geni, so I perhaps want to talk about some of the less obvious ones, you know, people and getting them to change. And if you want to share anything that feel free, but, you know, explain to our listeners the challenges, but also opportunities when it comes to the adoption of Gen AI. And if you do talk to on the people side, any things you would say that you’ve learned that’s worked well to get people to understand and actually adopt Gen AI,

Martin O’Malley  21:20  

yeah. So I think the, you know, if you start off with the the premise of, you know, the solution is delivering the quality I talked about. It’s secure, it’s not violating privacy. That has to be given. That’s the basics. What I think the the critical thing from there is identifying, how do your process meet your processes, your internal processes need to change. How do you actually educate and actually change the way in which you work? And I’ve seen this countless times, also when we implemented systems within water school, you know, you adapt to salesforce.com, or workday, unless you make it the way you work and you say, okay, all of your HR courses of how I’m now going to actually put a request into open a new position, you cannot just email your HR person say, Okay, I want to hire somebody. No, you have to actually go into update open the position and kind of make it, make that the way what you work. And I think that is a big, big barrier for legal professionals, because they have to make that step so but I think that’s a that’s partly educated in them as well. And I think it’s also, I think, focusing on what is the impact for them, what are the impact is time saving. What the impact is, you know, you’re going to get more quickly to a high quality recommendation for your client. You’re going to get your memos out faster. And you’re going to do that in a way which, frankly, focuses you, you know, gets some of this productivity game that we’re trying to to see. But not just, you know, measuring efficiency only is one thing, but I think also that they’re working more effectively. So I think it’s also showing by doing, as it were, and I think that’s where that support of, you know, helping them kind of get it working is critical. It doesn’t, it doesn’t end with the customer taking the solution ends with Frankie. I always say the you know, when you we’re we’re a business that’s focused on renewals. We want to sell products. We start relationship with customer. We sell something. That’s a relationship that we want to continue. The renewal starts with the sale. And everything between the sale and the renewal is what you do to support the customer so that the next time around, when you come back, they’re gonna say, Okay, I’m getting so much value from your solution that I want to continue it, and frankly, I want to expand my users. So there’s a there’s a very logical fit between the business objective and the client objective of you know, you’re helping your customer be successful, because if you help your customer be successful, you also be you’re also being successful as a business. So it ties back to what I was saying earlier on about the net promoter scores. We use those continuously to measure, is it hitting them up? Because that’s ultimately got another hit so much. Yeah. And

Robert Hanna  24:14  

you obviously inevitably increase your customer lifetime value with that approach as well.

Martin O’Malley  24:18  

Absolutely, absolutely. That’s that’s the key, yeah, and

Robert Hanna  24:22  

people don’t think about that when you get it’s so hard to get a new customer that you know, so doing that work to get them in, you want to extract that lifetime value. And then those customers become your instant referrers, your fans, your super fans, if you like, and actually going out there championing your product and big advocates for your product. And then the new business floods in from from there. So yeah, again, just really smart, really encouraging for other CEOs, business leaders, entrepreneurs, lawyers, thinking about business like that, really getting deep into understanding the relationships and offering value throughout that time, you’re going to increase that customer lifetime value tremendously. Okay, a bit of a tongue in cheek question here. But will Gen I bring fundamental. Or incremental changes. Tell us your thoughts.

Martin O’Malley  25:04  

I think it can bring fundamental changes, but will bring them in incremental steps. And I think that’s mainly because of the nature of how legal professionals operate. I think that cautiousness that sits in their nature. And, you know, I think there are, I would say, exceedingly deliberate and implementations. I think you have to take them on the journey and steps, but keeping very much focused on ultimately, you know, the long game, which is helping them be more effective. And I think it’s not just a measure of business effectiveness, it’s also, I mean, if you look at the quality of life, the work life balance, I think there are still a lot of gains we read there. And that, I would say, applies both to the corporate lawyers as well as law firms. They have that same struggle. So I think it’ll take time.

Robert Hanna  26:03  

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Martin O’Malley  26:45  

Yeah, that’s a whole other discussion, but I do, I do think that the firms that are now kind of embracing and starting to kind of put their toes underwater and test them, those will be the ones that are best positioned to actually really adapt it, if it becomes like a matter of best practice. So I think that’s where I worry most about firms, where they’re kind of saying, Well, you know, this is not our beer. I think, I think it has to be your beer in some shape or other. And that measured approach and kind of engaging is the best way to work with it. But I also see is that interest is also very uneven within so you can have, you know, I guess you always have the leaders, you have the laggards, but it’s also about getting the champions within firms. You kind of have that disposition and have an interest in technology, versus the partners who will say, okay, you know, technology, to me, is a little bit of a technology. And because I think we should, we should bear in mind that most lawyers don’t care about the technology. They care about what the technology does for them, and that we shouldn’t lose sight of that it’s, it’s, ultimately a means to an end,

Robert Hanna  28:03  

and it will become more understood. It will become more day to day. You just think back to dial up internet. We still used it. It was slower. It wasn’t complete, it wasn’t brilliant. Then obviously fibre and everything you know, an evolution, I think, I try and encourage people to almost think the other way, that it’s almost being lazy. Now, if you’re not adopting AI, you’re not you’re not thinking about how we can be as efficient and how we can enhance our client experience and be as client centred as possible. Because if you’re staying in a in a lane which has always been on, and other people are going there, and to your point, you don’t necessarily need to be the first out the gate with something, and it not be of equality, but you need to be reimagining, rethinking, you know, we’re going through not just an industrial revolution. We’ve had piers Linney on the show, who’s a former Dragons Den investor and lawyer, taught very openly, and said knowledge based work will go to zero, whether lawyers like it or not. You need to think of the value pyramid with technology coming in. Where does your human touch come in? Where does your value happen? Because this isn’t once in a revolution. This is a once in a species time opportunity. So, you know, I love again, that you talk to talk to the importance of, you know, being curious, but also thinking of things through methodically and ensuring that you put your client first. I think that’s such a key message throughout this podcast for anyone thinking of launching anything really do put yourself in the seat of how your client sees it, because then you’ll deliver more value and more trust. So let’s stick with some of the benefits and risks. Then you’ve talked to it a little bit. But let’s go a bit deeper in terms of some of the key benefits, but also potential risks associated with the adoption of Gen AI, with the legal field, I guess putting a shoe on the other foot, I’m saying, Go for it, but there’s obviously, you know, let’s say they’ve gone for it. What are some of the potential risks? And then how can people go about mitigating the trust, in regards to the importance of trusted content or things that are

Martin O’Malley  29:43  

put out there. Yeah. So I think the risks, if you look at the quality aspects, the risks that young lawyers will actually take for for grant. Terms of the quality that the models that deliver still actually, is actually quality. And I think that’s that’s an education. It’s not just education. It’s also about how we set it up in a way, where so we are, when I look for your perspective accountant, we are very careful about how we put accountant into models from a training perspective. So we work with rag, we work with API, so we’re currently experiencing experimenting with a couple of third parties to look at, how can we bring our content in a safe way, safe model perspectives of the JIT doesn’t get sucked up into somebody else’s large language model, but safe in the from the customer perspective, that the answers to getting our quality assured, I think the risk is that young, look younger lawyers will actually take what they get from models, whether it’s, you know, chat, GPT, whatever it is, deep sea, they’re taken as has been, has been managed. Yeah, the interesting thing on that. And this is a risk I hadn’t thought about until I talked to clients about last week, which was, you know, someone said, Well, you know, all these young lawyers by going through this grunt work and having to, you know, review documents and research, you know, and so if this work is now being done for them, it’s been replaced by AI, and even if it’s safe AI, how do they learn? And I thought that’s interesting, because that’s a question that is, you know, is something that they’re going to think of a change process of the learning that lawyers get as they go through the university? How does that translate into their first jobs in law firms are corporate law so I think that’s that’s kind of a new dimension I hadn’t thought about. But it again, comes back to the change in my management point I was making early on. But the other one I would say, and this is, I would say, it’s risk and opportunity combined. What I see at the moment is huge interest in what has been, I would say, a holy grail in information for a long time, which is, how do you take this mass of information, or knowledge that’s sitting within companies and extract in the way of what’s creating more value than the customer, and combine it with other sources of information, What is sitting on SharePoint, whether it’s sitting and, you know, in people’s emails boxes. This is something that the use case that you know when I was working with with research and development in pharma already back in 2010 and we’re trying to kind of do that as well, saying you’ve got massive information and literature, you have previously research work that was done entirely within a pharma company. Can we with federated search or data warehouses, kind of bring all this information together and avoid that you end up recreating the wheel? And I think the opportunity now with Gen AI is to bring that closer together. What I would say again, you then get into the, you know, I would say customization. Hell of how do you make it work for customers at scale, where it’s it works, it’s repeatable, and the same bonding principles apply. So, yeah, I’m not sure if that’s helpful or not, but I think it was just a new dynamic there. But I think we’re still kind of figuring to, you know, whether it’s risk or opportunity, and sometimes it can be risk and opportunity,

Robert Hanna  33:31  

absolutely. And I think a lot of the time actually it is, and it’s a very, very, very fine line. I think it also takes a certain personality type that’s got an appetite for risk to to also think about these things as well and and to your point, I delivered a keynote earlier this year for the law droid AI conference, and talk very spoke very openly to that point that your client mentioned about, well, the traditional lawyer job is going to change. It categorically, has to change fundamentally. We need to rethink what this new workforce of lawyers look like, and what are the skills that are going to be absolutely fundamentally needed once you know the the technology is given that is safe and, you know, sensible to use, and, etc, etc, where do we we move to that point of the pyramid of up the value curve in terms of that human interaction, where is that going to be most valuable to the clients so they are fit for purpose, for that for the Client. So again, thanks for for sharing that. I almost don’t like asking this question, because it is so hard to predict. But you know, you’re super knowledgeable, you’re in the in the trades, you’re going to have a view. So what do you think the future of Gen AI might look like? What developments Do you think we can expect to see over the course of this year and and the coming years? And you won’t be held to it.

Martin O’Malley  34:41  

So I think that it continues to in which existing solutions are given. I think that that journey, I think, if you think about that, that is that goal is already rolling, and it’s built on some empirical knowledge before Gen AI. Because I think that’s one of the dangers, is that the. Think about just J and AI as a window. It’s not it is a window, but it’s a window in the evolution of AI as a whole. So I think that that’s important kind of keep that perspective. I think the the most interesting thing would be how it’s actually going to change how people walk and and that will, you know, as we talked about, I think it’s going to take some time, but I think it’s, it’s inevitable that that will happen. And you know, if I look at our business, or we’ve got 20,000 employees globally, we also look at, what does this mean for our business internally, you know, we’re looking at what we’re seeing, we can do our marketing and our marketing more efficiently, how we deal with our content, and we deal with huge problems of content. Can we do that in a way where you can, you know, improve quality, get things faster into the hands of your your customers, and we’re looking at how we developed, you know, a huge chunk of our employee is probably about 600 of the 6000 employees plus are technologists. So the opportunities to improve how you do your programming, your development, where you can get stuff to the market faster. So I think it’s, I think the potential is hugely exciting, but it will take time. And that’s the, you know, the Yeah, that’s completely, I think, the mantra, and, you know, keeping our eyes on the form of quality is critical in that whole process.

Robert Hanna  36:37  

Yeah, I couldn’t agree more that the quality piece is so important, particularly with so many new entrants and products and, you know, almost everything coming out there that will rise to the top.

Martin O’Malley  36:48  

I think the new entrants one is interesting, because if you look at the right now, I think there’s a the last number of years, there’s been a lot of investment in bigger tech some of it, I think, well, will I question how well it’s actually going to return if I was there the investor? But I think it is, I think it’s kind of symbolic of the amount of change is happening at the moment, and the appetite for change and our experience is that new players put in new dynamics that’s going to influence the ecosystem where players at the obscure operate, but also the Microsoft and some of the newer players. But overall, we’re always, I’d say, a company that’s open to that, because what we learn from the new players is often, thank you, the argument that we do, and sometimes the argument is to a point where we say, okay, you know, wanting to be quite for our stable so we bring them on board. So I think that makes for a very interesting dynamic at the moment. And this whole area of the legal workspace is something that, I think is, you know, is something that you could see, not an interesting development of the coming years. And

Robert Hanna  37:59  

you gave a really good point there. Actually, I always say to a lot of people, lot of people, if you’re going to go and disrupt the market, get yourself noisy enough so the big players start paying attention, because then there’ll be the interesting conversations that you might want to have, like you said that could lead to an acquisition, a merger,

Martin O’Malley  38:13  

or something else, or a collaboration. I mean, sometimes it’s down to collaboration. So I think that that makes for for an interesting dynamic. And I think, yeah, really an interesting times

Robert Hanna  38:24  

we do. And I guess there’s a two part, you know, sort of final question before a final question before we close. You know, you’re the CEO of, you know, a super interesting business that’s doing some cutting edge work in and around the world of legal and regulatory. What’s one skill as a CEO of waters Kluwer that you know, you would never want to lose from your toolbox, given that we are in a more tech enabled workplace. And as a follow up of that, what are you most excited about looking forwards as a CEO? For

Martin O’Malley  38:51  

me, it has to be growth mindset, you know, if you I always say to my managers across the company, you know, becoming a great manager is not like baking a cake. You know, you’re never done as you’re never done as a manager. And I consider myself, you know, I’m a divisional CEO leader at the same time, and it doesn’t exclude me from needing to continuously learn. So, you know, an example of this is we had our executive team with Nancy, my boss, our CEO, in New York a couple of weeks back, and we spent two hours talking about agentic AI and thinking about how agentic AI may actually affect what we do, how it may affect our clients. And it’s an example of there’s just so much new stuff that you have to keep on top of, and that if you don’t have that growth mindset at a certain point, you go backwards. And I think the same applies to our clients as well. But sometimes it’s about embracing the change. It’s okay not to know everything, but you have to have the mindset. Of you know, I want to understand this. I want to know enough. I will never be an expert on agentically. I believe me, but I know enough to understand it, and think about, what are the questions I need to be asking, what my customers, but also my team, in terms of, how is this going to change how our customers operate? How does that? What does that mean, how we each operation, how do we actually kind of embrace that?

Robert Hanna  40:23  

Yeah, no, I love that. And I always say, you know, the comfort zone is great, but nothing ever grows there. And having that, that growth mindset, is so, so important. And look, it’s clear, and that’s obviously why Wolters Kluwer is doing fantastically well. You know, with you, obviously, you know, as the CEO, that you know it’s amazing the work that you’ve been doing, and that’s why we’re super excited to have the conversation today. So before we let you go, what would be your piece of advice for those wanting to learn more about Gen AI?

Martin O’Malley  40:46  

Just luckily. I mean, that’s the thing that I’m often surprised with. You know, I have conversations sometimes instead of table conversations, and people talk about AI, and you get all these, you know, it’s going to interval or two. It’s not gonna have any impacts. When they ask the question, you know, do people have the app on their phone? They have one of the apps on the table and still surprised, people say, Well, not yet. And my advice is, you know, go very much. See what it does. Experiment doesn’t have to be working for what context? Actually, sometimes it’s better not to use any work context, because you’re you’re gonna it just lowers the threshold. And I think that is the key thing, you know, get comfortable with this. And you know, don’t kind of step away from it. If you don’t embrace it in favour, you’re not gonna be wonderful.

Robert Hanna  41:32  

Yeah, lean into it absolutely and listen. I’ve really, really enjoyed today, Martin, it’s been learning more about your journey and indeed the work that you’re doing, and super impressive work that everyone’s doing at Wolters Kluwer. And if people want to learn more about your career, or indeed, Wolters Kluwer, where can they go to find out more? Feel free to share any websites, any social media handles. We’ll also share them with this special episode for you too.

Martin O’Malley  41:53  

LinkedIn, I’m happy to connect.

Robert Hanna  41:58  

Easy as that as well. It leads me to say, thank you so much once again, Martin, it’s been an absolute pleasure having this discussion from all of us on the legally speaking podcast sponsored by Clio, wishing you lots of continued success with your career and indeed, the work you’re doing at Wolters. Kluwers, but for now, 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.legally speaking podcast.com. Has a link to join our community there, over and out.