Latham & Watkins

friendly, more civilized.

It's a curious one, though, isn't it? Because it's a sort of, sorry, John, it's a sort of inconsistency that we find often, particularly in recent years, I think, which is that increasingly it seems that for kind of associates that the difference between working at a magic circle or top level uk firm and a us firm is not that big apart from the difference in salary really so uh you know i know someone who worked at a really high flying us firm for a long time and uh he's now at a magic circle firm he basically says his hours are the same he just has to do more sort of admin back non-billable work and you know somebody else described to me that one of the problems with uk firms in london is that the hq is in london which makes it inherently political Whereas, kind of like what you said there, Kat, if you're working at, you know, let's say Latham & Watkins in London, big office, but also you're not the hub of that firm and you can sort of get on with legal work more than the rest of the politics that goes on with it.

Yeah.

I mean, one of the things you hear about, I don't know whether there's truth to it, I don't have personal experience, is that you do at the big UK firms, you do have these levels of administration, partners who aren't doing client work.

I, I think you're gonna see a lot more on-prem as well.

Uh, did you guys see the news on Latham Watkins today? Or yesterday-

Well-

...

[laughs] Who knows what's capable by then? Uh, Kirkland & Ellis, the world's largest firm by revenue, committed $500 million to, uh, build a proprietary AI platform in May.

Latham & Watkins said last week it purchased its own N- NVIDIA GPU servers and leased private space over the past three years, though the firm declined to disclose what it's spent.

Goodwin Procter said it has set aside $25 million annually for AI.

MX2, [air horn] uh, runs what are called agentic workflows, meaning the system acts on its own to pull medical records, retrieve police reports, generate demand letters, and track case patterns across the firm's national caseload without a lawyer initiating each step, according to the firm's announcement.

Two of the early changes I made in business were as follows.

So the first advice, and it ties through this whole discussion, came from a lawyer named Jerry Peters, who finished his career at Latham & Watkins and built a highly successful business.

legal practice, crazily successful in the healthcare world.

And he was somewhat of a mentor to me and a brilliant person.