Transcription
Welcome to a Legal Tech Talk podcast. Shaping the future of law.
Hey Jaylen, welcome to the latest episode of Shaping the Future of Law by Legal Tech Talk and really excited to chat with you today. I think you've had one of the most impressive legal ops careers of of anyone that I've ever come across in in the space. Um, for anyone that is not so familiar with your work and and your backstory, how would you describe your your career to date?
>> Hi Bradley, nice to join you on your podcast here. Thank you for inviting me. How would I describe my career to date? I most recently wrapped up 10 plus years of legal technology and innovation work I did inside legal departments and engineering departments at the Fortune 500 companies which uh we could go down the list of them. I was most recently at Netflix before that Spotify before that Cisco and then a startup. Before that, I tooured as a musician for a bunch of years, playing bass guitar and singing in rock bands around the world. And before that, for a minute, right out of college, I did QA software engineering because at the end of the day, I am super technical. So, that was a fun right out of college job that showed me a lot of things about software.
I mean, it's a a great background that that you've had that sort of led you up to where you are today in launching your own business, which we'll come on to. When you look at your career, has it been thought out? Like, did you always have a vision of where this was going or is it a series of leaps that you've taken along the way?
>> It's really, it's probably a hybrid, a combo of the two. I certainly in college had more tech company building software dreams. I majored in business and software design and infosystems design and I saw myself doing the things like I do now. Like this morning I built a really amazing Excel formula that pulls data from another sheet and building the macro to call the sheet and update it and have a nice little automation. Like those are the things I studied in college. And I saw a lot of pathway to what I do now, what I did in-house with legal technology as an in-house operator, what I'm doing starting my own company, an AI tech startup right now. But then there was this other mode that kicked in with music that allowed me to dream down the path of that kind of endpoint of writing music, um, composing, seeing music in films or on social media with other artists or performing live shows like I used to years ago. So, it's hard to imagine coming back to a spreadsheet after being on stage playing in Paris to an audience of 50 people. But when when you boil everything down to its essence, all of this is about innovation is about creating. Software is about creating a better way to do something. Every single product you make has a story, has a narrative, has an audience, and you need to engage them. And so, um, I get to use the same skills across both mediums. And, and may we all borrow skills from different mediums. Music can certainly use more business skill and professionalism. And uh the corporate and tech world can certainly benefit from the putting things through a creative lens which they do but uh doing more of that.
>> So you're you're kind of saying that legal innovation, legal ops is art.
>> I think so. Yeah.
>> Especially when you
>> and and a lot of science and a lot of science. Uh and and art and science are the one of the most fun dueling modes of debate to be in. There's a lot of science beneath everything, but there's also when you look at what engineers are doing, and when I watch my CTO code stuff overnight that the customer asked for yesterday, I'm like, how did you do that? He draws with zeros and ones and like, you know, these these coding languages that are a little more sophisticated than zero and one. But I think it's art and I think it all involves seeing into the void and imagining what that can look like and building it but iteratively which is very much an artistic >> craft. That's the craft. That is craft is iterating on the version of something um until it's done or it's good enough to ship.
when you walked into Spotify, what what was the state of Legal Ops on day one? What was that journey like? And and what what what did success look like there?
>> Yeah, day one was it was wild. This was in 2018 and I knew from the interviews Spotify's goal was to IPO in about a year from then. And I was brought in to help with projects that are part of IPO readiness. There was no legal ops person or team. Oh, wait. No, there was one guy. Steven Scorziello was there and he was the lawyer that was running legal ops and putting in some of those tools, but needed a tech counterpart. So I went in actually to engineering as the tech product manager to partner with him and bring all the foundational things online. There was nothing when he and I got there and we put in he put in the CLM as I was entering. They put in docy what's now docyign clm and they're like can you build a deals desk that is ready for an IPO grade company in uh let's see I joined in March and they wanted it by June 1st and and I almost threw up at the ask because I came from a slower moving ship big company >> and I was like you want what what what in three months >> and after I got a little dizzy and some vertigo and um very overwhelmed at the speed in which they looked at me and they're like, "Can you do it? Can you build it?" Um, we'll give you Accenture to build it with. And I was like, "Uh, sure. I'll figure it out. We'll figure it out. Sure." I I was overwhelmed. And then equally, I was crazy enough to be like, "Well, let's try it." And, um, we tried it and we I went right to work on the big thing. I didn't have a strategy and all the things that >> you get to do at some jobs. you get time to get to know everyone and build a strategy. I went into the deep end of a mega deadline driven project and July 1st we stood up not June I got another month out of the deadline and stood up something that was so hard and so big and but it was launched and I learned a lot about talk about versions I learned a lot about shipping the minimum viable product and something that can work day one and then we're going to build more and more requirements ments into it as we go and expand. And that taught me almost everything I know about software, the development life cycle, starting small with a product you can ship that is crappy enough, but it works. And you have to be willing to ship crappy crappy barebones product and put it in front of the customer and be like this. And they were like this. That was what was so great about the environment at Spotify. It was so I was also in engineering, but it was so startuplike >> and entrepreneurial. They're like, "You're a genius for delivering a very basic MVP." And I'm like, "Cool, maybe that is genius." And uh it it changed my approach to everything and taught me a lot of formula that I needed later in Netflix, a lot of which is speed, build it. Um, Netflix we used to say ready, fire, aim.
>> Mhm. That means you're not getting enough requirements and you really don't know. You get enough, barely enough, but you're just shooting cannons off and then trying to steer everything while it's in the air. Um, and then of course that mindset is what I would will need and amusing in this new mode, starting a startup.
>> I'm sure that's given you some firepower that's going to stay with you for life. and and you went from one of the sexiest and you know fast growth companies out there which I guess still operates like a startup today I I imagine to another in in Netflix that has changed the whole way the the world consumes
>> I don't know what you call it entertainment TV movies
>> consumes consumes scripted and unscripted um content sure
>> what what did your journey at Netflix look like and how did that compare to to Spotify,
>> the Netflix journey felt like the Spotify felt like a company in adolescence and it was when I got there it had just turned 10 years old. It was only in the states for five or six years. So it was an adolescent company going for its IPO and it just had more of a youthfulness and a playfulness literally coded into its corporate values as well. It was very fun there and felt very young and I've never laughed so hard as I did at Spotify and all of my colleagues were like we were in a band played concerts every month. I let a band uh Spotify paid for our rehearsal studios. Like it was just what what is happening here? And then you get to Netflix and it's the adult version. It was the young adult version of that. It felt like it was a 22-year-old who was like stepping out into the world. While I was at Netflix, the company turned 25. Um, and sure, it was a public company by now, so it had its bearings. It had its own apartment, but it still had a lot to learn about um, process and building systems for scale. um building systems and and new legal tech for a legal department of 400 that went up to a thousand the what worked yesterday the spreadsheet the tracker like doesn't scale how do you scale those things when I first started at Netflix I sat talking to legal leadership I was in legal this time and I'm like okay give me a sense of the budget that you guys run as leaders so I know how to work in with you where to show you how we can optimize and save and invest in tech and save, etc. And they looked at me and they went, "What do you mean budget?" And I was like, "Wow, wow. Okay, we're print we're printing money in the basement. Okay, we're going back to like square one." And that was the similarity of both companies. It was foundational legal ops and technology, a data and tech plan strategy to put in and build that foundation for them all. um and get them from their versions of zero to one. And those were really fun, hard jobs, but fun.
>> I I can imagine. And I'm slightly jealous. Not not of all the tech stuff that you do cuz I couldn't do that. But the environment sounds amazing. And Netflix is kind of known for amazing talent, high talent density, empowering people. Like, did this enable you to do stuff there that you maybe wouldn't have been able to do at another company?
Yeah, that there's the talent density thing where you hire someone in your hiring strategy. The person is just so talented and obsessed with excellence in all of their output and being on an Olympic dream team kind of um working work environment, high performance, high expectation, high integrity, high feedback. It was it was uh really all the lights were on with all of that culture, all of those cultural elements. And then there was this thing where you were trusted to be the expert and to do great work and even if you messed up and made a mistake, so long as you stood up and shouted it, wrote it out and were committed to learning from the mistakes and using them as navigation points, you were rewarded. And there there's no steering committees at a place like Netflix. There's no approvals. Sure, you have to get alignment from people and you have to sell everyone on the vision. So that's the same at every corporation, but the mechanics are quite different. And so I was able with my team to move a lot faster and implement a lot of tech without all that overhead of process, RFPs, etc. And I've I built so much tech that when I came out of Netflix, there were fumes coming off of me. And I needed a few months, maybe a year >> to just let those dissipate and process what just happened.
>> It I was there for almost six years. It felt like 12 years work at at like another company, which that's what it means in those environments. They're so dense that you in the year's time you do with they taught me this at Spotify. In a year's time, you do the work of three years at a regular company. And because of that, you're going to have a new job in a year because something you've solved for created more opportunity in the company. And that's how it it goes. And as
>> you're looking very youthful, so you you've dealt with that stress. Well, I think that's going to be a whole another podcast on how to deal with this. Um, were there any moments at Netflix or any any of these companies that you've been involved with where you felt like you've shifted things from tech adoption working in maybe silos? I don't know if you ever ever did to like feeling like this is a companywide strategic initiative and it's had companywide impact and if if so, what what was that?
>> Yeah. And you know, some of those threads are why I started a tech startup that sure will serve legal to get what they need out of the contracts, but also will serve finance to finally get what is hard to get out of the contracts. What I found at Netflix was every time I stood up a contract workflow, a contract solution, a contract, anything, any tech evolution helping move data along. um and fetch data and gather it so that people can paper things more quickly. The first people online to benefit from that were always finance and and I did a big um with my team we built a big studio production contracting tool that put this tech product in the hands of every single production at Netflix. Netflix has when I was there at its peak had 400 productions rolling at once globally. That's absurd by the way for a scale like Disney has six. This is how Netflix was and how it won all of its prominence is volume is quantity over quality for many years and now they're on a bit of a different journey as far as I can tell from afar. Um, but one of my technologies was in the production pipeline helping paper all the contracts for all the background actors on most of the productions and finance was always in the meetings like, "Jen, how do you help us get more of these financial points out?" I'm like, "I I don't know. Let's figure it out. How do you build a calculator with ThinkSmart's TAP workflow program?" I'm like, "I don't know. Let's figure it out." And the more legal tech gets built, the more it's actually enterprise technology. It just needs to start in a legal place. It starts around contract stuff. So, it taught me a lot about legal tech place now, where it's going in the future, how bringing contract data online is a boon for a lot of people in an enterprise or in a production workflow. And it planted a lot of seeds. And I always found that a lot of our solutions in legal tech served a lot of the enterprise and sometimes more sometimes that it puts a window of glass in front of someone in the enterprise so that they don't have to come and ask the lawyer those 10 things. They can search for it and get it. And uh yeah, there was a really fun set of experiences that gave me so much perspective on what all this means, legal, tech, and technology inside a company.
>> Not many people would handle the pressure of I think the responsibility that you were given in in these what what is the mindset required for that and how is that translating into you launching your own business now?
>> That's such a good question. Um, when I was recruited to Netflix, I was worried that it wouldn't be hard at or challenging enough in some ways. And my hiring manager said to me, he was from New Jersey. He was a lawyer from New Jersey, lives in California now. And he said, "Jen, Netflix is like Netflix Los Angeles, where I moved to, was like had the attitude and the grind and the hustle of New York City, like in this little studio lot and everyone's going really fast and is really alert." And he said, "Trust me on this. Everyone here is like you and you'll you'll thrive." And and he was right. And what is that mindset? It is go go go. It is fully consumed. It is high energy, high input, high output, high performance. It is a grind in in some ways. It is war in a lot of ways. When I led my team, I used a lot of war strategy and death and killing. Not literally obviously, but just killing the old way of doing something and trying to find this visionary, exciting new way to get everyone bought into and marching with you towards a new way of doing that piece of legal work or that search or that process. Um, and I don't know, there's a lot of there's a lot of proverbial death. You just have to to transform anything, you have to be willing to part with the past and a legal ops tech and ops and tech team and a leader like me has to inspire this new place for people to work towards to change their behavior towards. So I don't know, there's this outfront part of the work that is always drawing the future for them storytelling. Um, yeah. So, the New Yorker aspect really helped. Like some days you're walking in New York City. This happened to me once >> and some guy just shoved me like not just like a shoulder neck. Like I must have been in his way and he just took my shoulders and flung me and I like whoa and was rattled for a few minutes. You need resilience like that. it. You need a a resilience and a toughness and a tenacity to work at a place like Netflix cuz sometimes someone will just take you and fling you and you're like, "Whoa, that was kind of fun, kind of scary." And uh I think all my training as a New Yorker held there for sure. And all the caffeine I know how to consume and drive myself out. As as we mentioned earlier, you and I are like five coffees in.
>> Yeah. Well, I' I've shifted to tea now because I didn't want the jitters that I'm hosting this with with you. But I I think we could talk for a long time about the stories here. Want to move on to the next step in your journey. You went from these behemoth high growth companies to then leading uh what I what I believe to be the biggest legal ops community in in in the world. And with Clark and what what was that journey like and what did it teach you about the state of the sort of legal ops market? Did you Yeah. What were the key learnings in in that part of your journey?
>> Yeah, the clock uh I was president of the board of clock for almost two years, a board member for 5 years, just a community member for all 10 years. Um so this is my first like two months out of not being affiliated or chasing that organization. That organization taught me a lot about how important service is as a value and giving into something quietly a lot of the time like it's not you don't see the work that someone like me did in the early days behind the scenes. I was just cranking behind the scenes, helping the then board be successful in mounting their events and then getting a chance to start speaking on stage and then serving at that capacity, then serving in the content making capacity, helping start their podcast. It's just giving for for the benefit of community. And I didn't realize how strong community even was cuz when you're inside something you start to stop you just stop seeing everything. You're just in it. But when I switched gears and went into the startup mode recently and I saw how much community was around me, with me, beneath me, on top, like all around and the real strength of relationships I have with a lot of people from the legal ops community. I was like whoa. I was even taken by the strength of those relationships and how people followed up and showed interest in the new product etc. Um so service and community and then it showed me that with the growth of clock to almost 6,500 people globally. Uh that's law service providers, tech providers, that's law firms and that's largely there's an in-house member cohort. That's probably the bigger biggest cohort of the three. I saw a lot of folks switching into legal ops from contract management or they were doing lit ops for years and they broadened or they were parallegals and the membership skewed newer in the career of which shows me oh my god this thing is just getting started even though I've been in it for a few years and some more than me this is still a new field a new career that's in its infancy opening 5 to 10 years but Every department is still turning the lights on and just starting out. It like Netflix and Spotify weren't late. They were right on time starting their functions in 2018 and then
>> wait Spotify started 2017 with me 2018 Netflix. So there's so much ahead we don't know. And I find that very exciting because that means there's scope for people to grab, solve for, define and then come out and speak to your community about it. And what will happen when you start speaking in your community is what happened to me. I think it was who I think it was Connie Brenton who turned to me years ago. She calls me and she's like, "You're a thought leader." I'm like, "What? What are you talking about, Connie? I'm just doing presentations on knowledge management at Cisco before Spotify." And she goes, "No, you don't understand. You're a thought leader and we want you to do a presentation at Clock on this topic with someone else with Francis." I'm like, okay, that's what community can start to do for you when you serve and give to it. It will pull you into places you might not even know you're qualified to be and speak on it or lead the moderate the panel, etc. And those are powerful opportunities in all of our careers to build a career, to build your personal professional brand, to move forward and to learn
>> 100%. And legal ops is uh still a very new function for many businesses and I feel like in US it's even more mature than Europe. There's many businesses that are just building a legal ops function now maybe haven't even got one. How would you say um to businesses just implementing a legal ops function? Like what advice do you have for them and and for new people moving into those roles? If you got any like >> key pieces of advice.
>> Yeah, you're not late. You're right on time because tech never stops evolving. And I I had this convo with a peer of mine from in-house who's at a major European company, and she called to see the product I'm now building, contracts AI, and they don't have legal ops. And I said, "Lucky you because you with a product like what we're building now with these agentic AI products coming into the space, you can skip a lot of hell steps that we all got mired down in for years. Implementing a CLM." And it's not that implementing a CLM takes so long. It's all the prep and all the readiness and the metadata management and readiness and the finding of contracts readiness. There's at least a year of readiness before people can touch the tech and it go in and I believe with Agentic AI people can skip or accelerate a lot of those steps. The agent can do all the metadata tagging now. When I look at what our product does, I cry and I say I lost years of my life doing this with a team miserably aligning a metadata model. We don't have to do that anymore. And so what they'll be able to step in and do is going to allow them to leapfrog their own maturity forward and be at the next place at the the promised land for them which is different in every legal department. So, I'm really excited for those that maybe think they're behind or aren't where the US is. The US market, especially like California companies, like just consider like we made all the mistakes in those companies implementing everything in the last 5 to seven years. So you don't have to and you get to come in and be smart shoppers, check out all the agentic AI stuff and and proceed accordingly with solving and and it'll leapfrog um the b the business of law forward in your department.
>> Feel like this segus us some quite nicely to contracts. AI.
>> Yes.
>> But before Yeah. What? Tell me about it. You you've just launched your your new company. Contracts AI is not a CLM solution. It doesn't want to be one. It is a post signature contract intelligence platform that extracts all the data from the contracts, structures it and allows for a deeper, more granular search for legal to find a needle in a hay stack instantly using aentic AI search. And it connects into finance applications like your ERP solutions, your invoicing or supplier management solutions. And it agentically matches invoice to contract and then it using the agent reconciles invoices against contracts. That is a $10 billion market that the Fortune 500 are spending collectively on manually doing this and manually doing this and praying that the CLM gives some info that's helpful out in a structured way and it's not all there and all helpful and all structured. There's a ton of data that comes out, but it's actually very hard to maintain CLM and finance systems connections without a ton of still manual parts of the workflow. And this is the bridge between CLM and and ERP uh the accounting systems. It and it's a huge it's a newer market space and and people are seeing the product and going oh my goodness like it's it's hard to even know that there was a gap there because people are so conditioned for that to be all manual. But it's impressive. it imp I'm like blown away every day by what we're building and when I show it to my peers and I see their face and the validation from them I get very excited I'm like yes we are on to something and I think it extends CLM's value and can actually take legal data and turn it into business enterprise data and I think this is the first time that that will happen in such an automated way.
It sounds incredibly exciting and you you clearly um to take the leap to do this you need the confidence in it which which you clearly have. I mean what made you take the leap? How did you get the confidence? Was it scary? Is it scary? Like what what has been the early days of building a startup been like?
>> I took the leap basically uh confidence and courage. you mentioned you definitely need a lot of those things and I'm a human being those things they wax and wayne and I I have
>> and you're incredibly well known so you know everybody knows Jen so it's it's a it is a big thing to put yourself on the line and and and do something like this right
>> yeah it's really putting yourself on the line in a bigger way you're you're the business with your co-founders I knew I had the formula in the co-founders I had been speaking to them for a number of months and I felt it with them. And then we were kicking around all these ideas to to make something that isn't CLM, but we had this very cool domain contracts AI. It's it was a fun challenge to try to think up something that isn't a traditional CLM solution. And I mean, if I'm being frank, I was like in the wings part、 like advising a little bit with the guys on different ideas. I was not full-time. And then they gave me an ultimatum and then my wife shoved me into it. That's that's how that's the decision-making matrix of this person. I I'm a Libra. I'll just hang out in indecision way too long. And and even with the Netflix job, I was very indecisive. And Emily, my wife, was like, I don't know why you're still pacing the floor.
>> She's
>> she's awesome. I so much I couldn't do any of this without just her and her brilliance. But even with Netflix, she's like, "I don't know why you're still pacing. We're moving to Los Angeles." And I needed her to help pull that forward with me. And she helped pull it forward with the decision to take this big leap. I had her support, her backing. Um, she's doing very well in her business, so was able to hold down the fort if I'm bootstrapping a startup. And it was kind of the formula of all of that. Co, great co-founders, brilliant people. an idea that we found that I could be passionate about, I could tie my passion to and speak endlessly to for the next five years or more and build that vision, draw that picture for everyone in the world to see and then use the software to get to and then, you know, a family support system that just give gave me the little shove that I needed.
>> Well, I think you got a lot of support and I'm sure this is going to go incredibly well. What what are the early challenges or biggest challenges you've had so far?
>> The biggest challenges so far I'm a little over two months in. Yeah. Two months and a week into this. I thought I knew a thing or two about context switching while at Netflix because you would just be going from thing to thing to thing all day. Uh, and those things were different, but they were all ringing fenced into a pool of similar activities in legal tech and the stakeholder and leadership or showing tech to the customer, the all all the different hats. Yes, it was good training. There's nothing like being starting a business at zero. I mean, we didn't we don't have funding or we didn't have funding two months ago when we started. We have no money. We we incorporated all these kind of opening decisions. The number of decisions you have to make in a day. If you struggle with making decisions, they will exhaust you. So, it's about refining the system in yourself on how to make decisions very quickly that are informed and good enough. And if they're the wrong decision, you know, it's fine. You just keep rolling with it. Um, I've never felt a context switch like this. I've been sleeping very well at night and there's a lot to do when you're just opening the business. But I I'm enjoying the learning. It's stretching my brain in a very cool way and I I believe deep down I wanted these skills. I have these skills. I wanted to refine them. So, it's it's working out ultimately. But some days or some weekends I'm like, "Oh my goodness, there's a lot of different things to do from marketing to selling to fundraising to, you know, being a good colleague." So, um, just the stretch is something else.
>> Yeah, I I I went through launching this business that I'm in with with no money and we bootstrapped and uh it's it's good fun, I can say. What's your founding team like? So for me it was super important that the gaps I had was covered by my co-founder and we could fill in the gaps with you know a very important first hire. But what what are the next sort of like six months looking like do you think in terms of raising money? Is that through investors through getting clients on board? What's the short-term plan?
>> The founding team is myself as CEO. Um that's a a big sales and marketing and fundraising style job. That's my scope. Uh my co-founder funny, he and I are the goto market team. He's the funny Guru is our CTO. He builds the platform. He's an engineer and product manager.
>> Is he funny?
>> And I and he's very funny. So to live up to the name is just what what a win he he gets. uh my at some point we'll be hiring for uh sales folks, sales ops folks, people that can really help with go to market. They call it the GTM engine. Uh I'm doing all of the the sales now, which is really fun because I love being in the weeds with the customer and just studying their faces and emotions. But we'll build that out eventually. And uh we we are funded um a nice preede injection and we'll we'll fund more down the road as we get more customers on board and want to expand that expand the thing. So that'll happen in over the next year.
>> Good. Well, well done for getting the early funding. It's is going to get you going. Um, now I I'm sure. What What is the ideal customer for you then? like who is it you want to serve? How will that expand? Are you focusing on certain regions, types of clients? And what what what is the outcome you expect them to get from working with you?
>> Sure. Um, the first ideal customer profile is folks in legal. So it's your GC's offices, your legal ops teams that help serve the lawyers and the contract managers. contract managers, um, procurement legal professionals, anyone that needs the obligations pulled from the contract at scale, like show me all the unilateral termination agreements in all of our MSAs at the entire company so we can X so you know they can do some legal analysis or manage the contracts or how operate and that those questions cannot be answered today by CLM's uniformly across across the board. Some may be more than others are are there or getting there. We can do it now. We can do it in minutes. And I think it will unlock a lot of value out of the contracts. You know, when I worked at Netflix, there was the global shutdown during the pandemic. 400 productions, lights down, powered down. And what legal had to do was go through all the thousands and thousands of agreements underlying those productions and find the forced major clause on every single agreement. And they asked us if we could do that with Evas. We were in the Eversur implementation at the time. We weren't live yet. And I was like, "Ah, no. We're so close to the live, but nope, can't." And that exercise took two months, 10 contract managers, couple lawyers helping, etc. to cut and paste every force major out. Those days are over with a Gentic AI contracts AI can find that in four minutes maybe uh on 300,000 agreements. It could take five minutes but it'll find them all and table it up. So huge value to deliver on what legal needs now and as we establish the beach head with legal legal ops are going to show this product to their finance partners because of those other agentic features in their do not reload screen. So um uh finance procurement sourcing accounting they're in our pipeline now because the video I made has made its way to them. Um and I expect that our technology will be equally a part of the CFO tech stack in the future. So all sorts of finance profiled individuals.
>> Is this global or US for now?
>> It's global. It's it's global. We have we're talking to customers in all three regions in APAC, the United States, and uh are we nothing South America yet, but I trust they're they're coming. and some companies in Europe as well. Um, my co-founder funny program managed or product managed the GDPR roll out at Google. So our platform is GDPR ready because he builds at at such a scale being an exgooller. Um, and yeah, we're we're able to deploy anywhere and given my reach from the community and having been around the world a few times serving for clock I and working in companies that have folks in all three regions. I have great friends everywhere and even if they're not calling, they're f like it's out there and we're getting calls from all regions and it's really exciting. So, a lot of Fortune 500 are calling, a lot of midsize companies are calling, and we we can serve both really well. You don't you can have a CLM and want to potentiate in your contract stack how you dataify everything, data warehouse everything. You can only have a SharePoint folder and just need to search over the top. And we're able to scale up and down uh and serve and either either of those organizations.
I'm uh super excited to follow this journey that you're on. Uh it sounds you've got the the bones in place now to to build something great. You've got the the brand, the connections, the team, some funding to to get going. Do you have an ask of the in industry or is is there something that's going to help you along this journey that you know for anyone that's tuning in here that might want to help? Yeah. How how can you help?
>> Yeah, how how can you help? Um, you know, I've been speaking with a lot of folks more like Europe called this week. This is like my fourth or fifth call just thinking and being in the in someone in conversation with someone in Europe. So, I'm thinking a lot about the market there. And I know it's very in a different place than the states and different countries will be in different places in terms of their journey. How you can help I mean how you can help contracts AI is call us for a demo andor like Glory David Henrik wants to do she wants to set up a a breakfast where she brings in some cutting edge agentic AI technologies to show folks locally how you can adopt or apply these technologies in in at your companies. What's great about Agentic is they're solving a very small narrow thing very well. And so it's actually a great place for legal transformation people to get started. So yeah, call us, get a demo, or come hang on LinkedIn in the comments where I tend to be making a lot of noise and posting and I have a product demo video up there as well to just get the word out that there's newer ways to do contracting.
>> Well, you you you've been in the trenches. You've you know, your whole career has led to this moment and I'm sure people are going to learn a lot from you and you're going to help a lot of people in in the space. Do you have any parting message for anyone on their on their sort of legal transformation journey before the calls come flooding in or before before we yeah tune out of of this podcast?
>> Yeah, I think my parting message is community is really important in your pursuits even especially you're going to find yourself as the oneperson show inside your company. Maybe it's a small legal department. It's a lot of decisions to make and it's helpful to bounce it off of others. So, definitely extend out and find like-minded people. There's lots of community groups around this space because it's hard work to do and it's hard work to do alone. So much of what I learned was from peers in the community and getting that support or that validation in how I'm solving a problem. So, yeah, definitely get out there and and serve. I think it's the the the best way to get back from people is to give. And I'm still marveling over what I get back after my years inside a nonprofit serving the community. It's it's wonderful and uh it's it's really full circle and it's a great thing to be a part of.
>> I've just asked some of my team to read a book. It's called the go-givers and the the thesis of it is give without the expectation of getting back. Just give for for giving sake and you'll be surprised actually what comes back as a as a result and I I really believe in that as well. It's the ultimate value and I think if you can do that but in a business world you know, it's tough in the business world we all want money and I see that now more than ever being in a startup seat and seeing the people who talk to me now and the people who don't or won't um and understandably I'm selling a piece of software now but I still I can't give without an expectation of giving back and live without having to talk about it. That's another that's the definition of humility. It they're wonderful values that I believe like will further the cause and further business. Um, so yeah, we need more of that and it's it's Thanksgiving week this week in the United States. So I think these themes are also floating around my mind.
>> Yeah, I'm a big advocate of that. Reading that book kind of changed my life, changed my trajectory, changed as you say, people are coming back and offering help now. So, um, yeah, I like that as a parting message. Jen, it's been amazing to have you on. I'm sure we'll cross path again and I'll see you soon. And I'm going to put in a request, by the way. We're looking for a bass guitarist at our next event.
>> Oh, well, I'm for hire. He's a hire now.
>> What? We can't see through the virtual background are I don't even know, maybe 11 guitars. There's a lot of guitars in here. So, just just let me know. Let send me a chart or I'll just improv. I'll and we'll we'll play some music at LTT.
>> Yeah, it sounds like fun. Cheers, Jim.
>> Thanks, Bradley. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for listening. For more episodes like this, make sure you subscribe to Shaping the Future of Law on Spotify or YouTube. If you want deeper insights on legal innovation and how the sector is changing, make sure you head over to the Legal Tech Talk website. And if you want to see the future of law come to life in person, make sure you attend Europe's event for legal transformation. Details are all on the website. I look forward to seeing you there.