Richard Susskind

At the same time, I wonder, I suspect that if you actually sat down and tried to really formalize all of this beyond a certain degree, like a degree where it really becomes useful, like what a real full ontology of the law would have to look like, that becomes pretty quickly very difficult, I believe.

Like where I always come back to then is like this is the attempt of recreating what we miserably failed at as early as 30 years ago, expert systems, right? Like Richard Susskind, who was one of these wanted experts, they've, I don't know, it was some tax piece where they tried to create a system, essentially a decision tree of all the relationships, of all the provisions, and by and large it failed.

And you can't really do it because so often the bottom, the leaf at the bottom of the tree is the, well, it depends, right? So that's just the fundamental problem.

And even defining all the relationships, all the kinds of relationships that exist and that you need to consider, that's a pretty tall order.

I'm trying to connect the dots because in one way, the Civil Resolution Tribunal was then and still is now such a technologically forward and common sense approach.

to kind of removing that distance that you're just talking about for people to be able to access quartz as richard susskind would put it as a service right that's directly available to people versus like You're coming from a background that's fairly traditionally legal education and training.

What was the draw to technology? How did those two things come together?

The piece in between was leaving all of this for a year to do a master's in law at U of T.

In fact, that inspired my MBA dissertation on the topic of law firm knowledge management.

And I was drawing on some of Richard Susskind's work.

And so it was great to see that you've had him on the podcast as well.

But essentially, what we kept seeing was the same fundamental problems.

The base of every professional pyramid is contracting.

So to understand why this disruption is different, the brief relies heavily on the work of Richard Susskind.

The Susskind anecdote in the sources is just incredible.

Well, the email one.

And that's why we're so keen to have you on because you've seen those shifts because, you know, nothing changes if nothing changes and the market is moving.

And, you know, Richard Susskind has been cited many times saying the market will show no loyalty and you as the service provider need to move with the market, like you say, to ensure you are fit for purpose and giving them that value.

and extending it because yeah only constant business as we all know is going to be that level of change I think one of the things that I really liked about you mentioned from the startup is the failing fast because you know a lot of successful startups they're always coming up with ideas always coming up with ideas and they're happy to fail and that's part of the culture and they embrace that it doesn't set them back it propels them forward so it's great to hear that that's part of your ethos as well and I always say you're one creative idea we're one relationship away from from changing your career and you know if you keep with that sort of curiosity and mindset and creativity good things will So let's go back to, and I know we're zigzagging a bit here, but it's really going with the flow with this, because you played a huge role in obviously building out Perkin Coie's London office from the ground up, really, and quoted thinking, wanting a horizontal structure where people are empowered in the team to win the development of the business.

So when you started, what was the vision for the office and what did you want it to become? Our strategy was called Bebop.

Super intelligence is the foundation for it.

In that kind of world, why even say that the human needs to be involved at all? And then I guess the second part of that is how many humans? Do you see, like some commentators, Daniel and Richard Susskind, predicting the professions are going to contract in terms of numbers of people employed there? What is going to be the role in terms of the human labor market in the legal realm?

Yeah, I think this is very difficult to predict precisely how it's going to play out.

And I think the articulation of the challenge, it's a real one.

And so I would even say that you would hyper-tailor, not just I want tailored for the judiciary, but I think that what would be built for an appellate court might differ from a trial court, which might differ from even the magistrate judge who's tasked with discovery.

I've quoted Richard Susskind a million times.

His quote out of one of his books, or maybe all of his books, about the fact that one of the problems with... modernizing judiciary is that you can't change the tires on a moving vehicle and the judiciary never stops moving and it gets really hard to innovate or kind of work on redeveloping systems.

I mean, do you think that's changing? Is that something that you see as an obstacle or a speed bump that you're going to have to face going forward and working with them?