Hello, sun listeners. Thank you for joining us today. Welcome to the service management section.

I’m Ryan Bankston of CIO Legal, your hosts. And I am very excited to be joined by Martin Catania today. As I said at the end of my last episode, this gentleman is my mentor of 15 years now.

It’s been a lot of things to me, Coach, sometimes a therapist, sometimes the man willing to give me those hard words nobody else would. So excited to be with you today, Martin. Martin is a longtime IT veteran in the Legal space and MSP space.

He’s currently an HR director, is working on a book, going to become an author real soon. He’s a father. He’s why he’s behind his years and he’s here with me now.

Thanks for being here. That’s an intro. I feel like this is going to be disappointing for everyone, no matter what now.

Thank you, Ryan. It’s a pleasure to be here. This is going to be fun.

Indeed it will. Indeed it will. Well, yeah, there’s a lot that I wanted to talk about heading into this, but, you know, no good plan survives contact with the enemy.

And unfortunately, some events have transpired recently with Hurricane Helene coming through, impacting our community, impacting many communities to the north of us, up and down the coast, on into North Carolina, a lot of places where I have a lot of friends, a lot of folks I know that are suffering. So, yeah, we’re certainly going to have to talk about that a little bit today. It’s a tough situation out there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was thinking about community and going beyond. So often when we talk about community and business, especially in business, networking, entrepreneurship, it all has to do with making contacts, switching business cards and trying to get business.

But when something like this happens in our area, it’s the community that we tend to lean on. It’s who you ask for help, it’s who shows up. And I’m very excited that you’re here with me and willing to lend a hand.

You know, after this, we’re going to be. We’re going to be going to an address that has some wet furniture to move, maybe even some soaked carpet to cut up and haul out. And you’re so generous in participating with me and doing that, helping the community out.

Thank you. I think it’s important and candidly, we’d probably all be better off if more people had that sort of attitude. You gotta help out where and when you can, and if the circumstances are right, you know, go for it.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I’ve been through many Hurricane evacuations and weather events like this, but this is the first time I’ve seen it impact my local community so heavily. Certainly we’ve had storms come through.

There’s been some flooding. There’s been some wind damage. There’s been, you know, people without power for a couple of weeks.

But just the sheer scale of destruction out on the beaches and along the bay has been. It’s been. I don’t even have words for it.

And I guess, you know, maybe I don’t need them, because everybody can kind of like, especially if you’ve lived it, you understand the awe it inspires in a very tragic way. Yeah. I think most of your listeners probably have a lot more context around this than I do.

So I’m out of Chicago. I don’t know if we covered that at all. Where we don’t get a lot of natural disasters, thankfully.

And I honestly don’t know how people do it down here. The amount of courage and tenacity that it takes just to live in that context and to recover from it, that’s pretty remarkable human quality. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. And the community’s certainly been pulling together here. I’ve been surprised at how the communities are pulling together.

Cause when something like this happens and. And you’re like, oh, you know, that figurative view, or it’s like, oh, I want to help out. How do I get involved? And seeing how that’s evolved in our community over these past couple of days has been pretty cool with the chamber sending out emails, political candidates kind of gathering their own groups of warriors to help out.

And where I’ve seen the most, like rubber meets the road, boots on ground is the different community associations, the Facebook groups that have to do with where you live or where you go to school. You know, those different groups. There’s been a lot of outreach.

A lot of folks like, hey, I’ll do your laundry. Come sleep at my place tonight. So, listeners, that’s the stuff.

Yeah. Right. I mean, that’s the people actually giving time and energy.

I think it’s. It’s easy to give money. Yeah.

And not that that’s not important, or that there’s not a huge place for that, or that we don’t need money when there’s a disaster to fix some of the challenges, but the actual physical donation of time, donation of energy, helping people with those tasks that they can’t do because their house is flooded, that’s powerful stuff. That’s stuff that people remember. Yeah, absolutely.

Anybody in our community listening to this? If you’re suffering right now, if you’re going through a hard time and you need a little help or someone to talk to, you’re definitely welcome to reach out to me through cio, Legal, or probably to just about any of the SUN leaders. You know, this, this group that I’m so fortunate to be a part of, we have a mission, a vision, and it’s all about building the community, helping each other out and growing. So, you know, find us on Facebook, come to one of
our meetings.

We meet a couple of times a month, first and third Friday of the month. You’re welcome to join us, you’re welcome to send us messages, and we’ll be there for you. We’ll see how we can, how we can help.

Martin let’s turn it to business. Because my podcast certainly focuses on business, I title it service management because I feel like there’s so much service management has to offer to especially small businesses, small service based businesses that don’t really know how to apply a framework to the way they do business. Sure.

I was reflecting on disaster recovery and when you’re in our line of work, which is typically managed service provider it, so often we think about disaster recovery as where you back up your data, but clearly there’s more to it than that. There’s a lot more to it than that. Since we’ve worked together, you’ve become what SHRM certified, you’ve become an HR director.

So you probably have something to add to when it comes to that disaster recovery plan that goes beyond your technology. Yeah, well, look, I’ve had a lot of roles, as you mentioned. I’ve been in service operations, managed services, IT for, gosh, 30 years pretty much.

And I’ve worked primarily with law firms in that time, although I’ve had an opportunity to work with lots of different kinds of business. But you’re absolutely right. When, you know, I think when people think about disaster recovery, they think about that first part of it, but they don’t always think about business continuity.

It’s an important part to know where your data is, to know that you can recover it, to know that you’ll be able to do business again. But what about that interim period when your customers need something from you and you may or may not be able to provide it? Have you prepared for those sorts of things? Have you prepared? So you mentioned HR specifically. You know, what if your payroll vendors down, do you know how you’re going to pay your people? You know, what about, you know, your insurance
carriers? You know, do you know how to get a hold of them? If you have an emergency.

Right. So, and this is again, things that I think a lot of larger firms, they have entire people or groups of people who do a lot of these things and make sure that they plan these things out for the firm. But small and medium sized businesses, I would argue, need that even more in some cases because, you know, they tend to have smaller clients who really need their services.

And, you know, if you’re a solo practitioner or a small legal shop, you may not have some of the tools, technology, or investments that other firms have in some of this stuff. But there’s lots of things that you can do to make sure you can continue to operate in the event that you run into trouble. And, you know, sooner or later trouble finds all of us.

Right. Whether we like it or not. So it’s not really a question of if you’ll have a problem.

It’s a question of when and how prepared you are for it. And, you know, how much the world ends up knowing about how prepared you are for it. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And I’m sure, you know, to some extent you can plan and you can plan, but when, when reality hits, you know. Yeah, 100%. Yeah.

Right. I mean, well, yeah, I can’t remember the quote now, you know. No, no, no plan survives disaster or something like that.

Right. Yeah. So I think there’s two things that are important about it.

One is from my perspective, you know, all the planning in the world is great, but if nobody knows what those plans are or how to enact them, or where to find them, or who to call to turn on the backup technology or, you know, whatever it is, right. The plan is going to be no good. Everyone’s going to be scrambling around still in the midst of that emergency when all that human emotion is running high and trying to make a decision.

So, you know, the first step, of course, is getting the plans, implementing the technology. But you also have to, you have to teach it to your people. They have to know, what are we going to do if we have a problem like this? You know, and I think Covid taught us some of this stuff, you know, particularly around facilities access.

Right. Well, you know, now most businesses are, you know, are prepared to deal with a close of facility. Obviously not in manufacturing and lots of other things, but certainly in the legal space.

Right. You know, most providers have access to their information, their networks, their technology. But yeah, you’ve got to know what those things are, otherwise you disappear.

And businesses can fail because of completely external factors that are totally out of their control. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

I’VE been in a couple of different situations where I’ve seen the lack of a disaster plan make a huge business impact and where the ability to make a plan quickly avoided it. Yeah. And I think based on my past experience, knowing who needs to get involved, to what extent you can or cannot do something ultimately makes a big difference in the moment.

Yeah, I had an office I was that I ran along with some other very distinguished colleagues. But it was, it was, you know, across an ocean, it was abroad. And there were some things that happened there that we just didn’t foresee, but they’re not, I would say, foreign.

The U.S. business offices, like a transportation strike that prevented people from getting to the office.

And how are those folks going to work if they’re not in the office, if we haven’t enabled them for remote access? Is that something that we can do in short term? And then if we do do that now, what questions do we need to ask ourselves? What kind of requirements do we need to have around there home Internet connections to make sure our data is safe, et cetera? International operations is a whole nother animal. And how do you know what you don’t know? Yeah. You don’t even know what questions to ask
sometimes.

Absolutely. Yeah. It’s hard enough when you have an office in say, Texas and one in New York and that’s a culture clash.

But yeah, when you’re talking about international businesses, offices in Europe, offices in Asia, like. Yeah, it can get. And you went there, right? You went to Manila for I think, specifically that reason.

Well, it was one, it was certainly one reason I was there. And we got a lot of good work done. Do you feel like you would have had different results if you would have tried to do that without going there and meeting people face to face and sitting across a table from somebody and just making that human connection.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that nails at that human connection that you just can’t get through teams or through a video meeting. Yeah, the one on one conversations, the like focus group discussions that we, you know, pulled, pulled folks away from their desk, you know, gave them something to eat and smile about and then was just like, you know, what, what’s your struggle? What’s hard for you? You know, if this happens, like, what would you do? And, and you know, it’s kind of hard to get that
level of engagement, honest engagement, you know, over, over a video that, you know, and let’s face it, some folks are just kind of suspicious of that type of engagement.

Of course they don’t want to be Vulnerable when they think, you know, maybe it’s going to be in the AI transcripted notes or whatever. Right. Even.

Even, you know, I think a lot of people are afraid to be that vulnerable with a supervisor or manager or any kind of colleague. Right. Like, how will this reflect on me professionally? Or how will it impact, you know, my opportunities down the road? Yeah, but so often, like, policymakers in business can get so removed from who they’re trying to help, you know, and if they don’t get that kind.

That level of engagement and that type of, you know, honest feedback from someone. Yeah. That’s willing to go out there a little bit, probably going to craft some pretty crappy policies, I think.

So they maybe look good on paper when it. But when it comes time to, you know, actually put them into use, the folks that should be benefiting from those policies are often, you know. Yeah, I think not benefiting from them.

I think it’s tricky. Right. One of the reasons why I took a little bit of a detour and got my shrm SCP and, you know, dipped my toe into the human resources space was I kind of wanted to understand some of these things a little bit better.

I think human resources gets a bad name a lot of the time. You know, a lot of people think of it as sort of this enforcement arm of the company that’s keep all the employees in line. And I mean, look, there’s.

There’s obviously a part of human resources that’s about managing the workforce. Right. And making sure that, you know, the businesses is getting what it needs in order to be successful and effective.

But there’s a whole nother half of it. And I think the two pieces are inseparable. You also have to be an advocate for the employee.

And, you know, your presence as an HR leader in executive meetings and conversations is. Is to sort of wear those two hats and to say, like, well, wait a minute. Yeah, the business wants to do this or needs to do this for these very important reasons.

But what will be the impact on employees, you know, and ultimately, what impact will that impact have on the business? Right. Because if we make our employees really unhappy with bad policies or bad decisions, then, you know, they don’t stick around. Yeah.

And, you know, we’re not really providing the culture that I think we want to provide. Yeah. So all that stuff’s always been super important to me.

I’m very people motivated. You know, everybody likes money, everybody wants to make money. We’re all in business, you know, to afford our lifestyles and all that stuff.

But you know, for me, the human element has always just been super important. And it’s important for me to, you know, feel like I’m part of a good team. It’s important to me that that team, you know, sort of looking out for each other and kind of all trying to row in the same direction.

It’s important to me that we can have the flexibility to have a conversation about that when. When we’re not doing that. Because everybody’s wrong sometimes, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So I don’t know, we got, maybe we got a little tangential there, but you know, for me, if you’re going to go to work every day, you got. You want to be happy with what you’re doing and who you’re doing it with. Right.

And I think that goes for just about everybody, or it ought to. I think people generally do much better work when they enjoy what they’re doing and they have a mission and a purpose that they can all kind of get behind. Absolutely.

And they feel seen and heard. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I think so.

What kind of tools has that certification gotten or given you to be able to do this? So I’ll say this, the SHRM SCP was probably the hardest exam I’ve ever had to take in my life. Oh, wow. And maybe that’s just because as an executive leader, I was responsible for a lot of the functions, but I wasn’t doing the day to day stuff.

I wasn’t up to my elbows. So I know what open enrollment is and I know how to make all the decisions and how to have conversations with insurance carriers, but I don’t know the nuts and bolts of it. How do we actually get this information out to people? How do we get their answers back? What are the timelines and deadlines and all that kind of stuff? And so the process of getting certified for me was super helpful in really kind of framing the context of, you know, what is an HR director really
responsible for? What do they really do? But it was a very, very difficult test.

You know, it’s about a four hour remotely administered test. And is it proctored? It is proctored. And you know, there was a very nice gentleman, I don’t remember his name, who helped me out.

But you know, even the proctoring process is, it’s a little invasive. You know, you’ve got to take your laptop and show them around the room and show them you don’t have anything scribbled on the wall and pull up your pant legs and your sleeves to make sure you don’t have all the answers written down, you know, and all that. I’m going to get triggered about my ITIL certification.

It was a weird experience, and I was already feeling super bad about the exam. I was confident that, that I was going to fail it, actually. You know, I’d agreed to do this opportunity, and one of the things that they’d asked me to do is, or to think about was to get certified.

And as soon as they said it, it was. I’m like, oh, yeah, I should do that. I want to do that.

But it was so different from what I had been doing at that time, and it had been so long since I’d done anything like that. It was a real struggle for me. I want to say I prepped about maybe 60, 70 hours for that exam, which is.

And I’m, you know, apologies to all the wonderful educational professionals, including my father, who I’ve worked with in the course of my entire life. I’m not, I’m just not a good prepper. You know, I don’t.

I never do what I ought to do. I kind of always know it. I think I, you know, the, the anxiety of, of, you know, the, I don’t know, the, the imminent failure is usually what gets me a little bit further.

But I, I, you know, even though I, I prepped super well, I was confident I was going to fail it, and I ended up passing it, probably by the skin of my teeth. They don’t tell you on shrm, which is kind of weird. They just tell you if you pass or fail.

They don’t tell you how bad you did or where you should shore up your, you know, skill set. I’ve. I couple of my recent certifications.

Same thing. It was like, you completed the test but didn’t tell me. Like, have you.

Did you pass? Did you fail? It’s like, I think it’s really weird. It’s hard, you know, I mean, it’s. Okay, look, I need to know how I did.

Right? Exactly. And from the purpose of demonstrating competence, that’s great. Right? But from the purpose of being a lifelong learner, understanding where you may have deficiencies, understanding what areas of the content you’re not really up to snuff on and should go back and spend some more time with.

I think it’s a bad practice. Yeah. Apologies to all the great organizations out there that are doing it.

I’m sure there’s a good reason. I don’t know why I tell myself that it has to be a flaw in the design, that it’s not intentional in some way. At least with a couple of certifications I took that were like, ediscovery type certifications to administer your E Discovery platforms.

If you’re listening out there, suddenly. But. But yeah, I thought it was just like, they put so much into the questions and the material, but they didn’t actually, you know, as sometimes happens in it, actually test it to see what that experience is like for the test taker.

And nobody, you know, either didn’t notice or by the time they did, didn’t have the time and resources to fix it. Yeah, maybe. We’ll see.

I grew up on the old adaptive Microsoft certification test where it was like, you get a question wrong and they pelt you with 10 more questions about the thing that you got wrong to see if you really know it or not. Right. Which was always terrifying at the time, but, you know, probably.

I mean, just conceptually, to me, it sounds like a stronger way to do it. Right. Like, we want to make sure, A, that you know the content, maybe you just made a mistake, and B, if you don’t know the content, we got to drive that home for you, because as a professional, this is an area that you’re expected to be fluent in.

And how do you understand that if you don’t sort of get the results? Yeah, when I was becoming Clio certified, that happened a lot where they would. They would ask the same question. But you’re a Clio partner.

Yeah, my new organization’s a Clio partner, too. Hey, we can be Clio partner, buddy. There we go.

We can share Clio stories. I don’t have any, but. Yeah, no, if.

If you do the certification track, you’ll see that too, which I don’t know if you would actually do in that, but. So it’s weird. In my role with my new organization, which I’m here as a private citizen, I don’t want to spend too much time talking about that, but I’m doing a little bit of hr and I’m doing some business development and account management for the legal vertical because, you know, I’ve worked in it my whole career, and I. I know a lot of great folks and, you know, helping to get
clients connected with the right people.

So I’m. I’m doing a little bit of everything, which. Which I love.

It’s kind of how I like to do it. Well, if you need any help with that cert, I can help you study. All right.

Is that allowed? Oh, yeah. Well, I think it is. I think we’ve known each other long enough.

How long have we known Each other. Martin, what’s got to be what, 16, 15, 17 years, something like that? I think that’s pretty spot on. Something like that.

It’s been a long time, I think. So I hired you back at K2 when we were kind of first really building up the service tech’s practice over there, right? Yeah. Was it maybe 30, 35 analysts, something like that at that time, I think.

Right. And then, you know, we topped out around 300, I think, before you and I both left that organization. Yeah.

Yeah. We did a lot of great things over there, too. We did, we did.

And I, you know, I want to talk about some of that because I love stories and I actually put in the description of the episode that we were going to do a little bit of. Do you remember when. Oh, and yeah, so I would love to go into that.

Sure, let’s do it. But I did want to ask, I just want to close up what we were just talking about the Sherm thing, because I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t get this one closing remark. Like, what were you able to apply from Sherm? Like the, all the workforce management, all the material in there, what have you been able to apply to? Like, better the business.

So I, I, I think, you know, just in a, in a very broad way. You know, everything I’ve done since coming into this role was somehow influenced by that certification and, and sort of what I learned there or, or more importantly, kind of what I learned I didn’t know or didn’t know enough about. Yeah.

I’m fortunate in my current role that we’ve got great legal counsel. Yeah. And he’s very available to me and I can run all kinds of crazy questions by him every time I have him.

You know, one of the major challenges that we had this year, we’re a Chicago based business, I think I mentioned that earlier, but Cook county and Chicago have all have been putting in new paid leave laws and paid sick leave laws and just sort of negotiating, making sure that you’re compliant with all of the different codes and all of the different ordinances can be, can be challenging. But I learned a lot about employment law and I learned about a lot about the resources that the Department of
Labor has. And those are really important things, I think, to be aware of and for employees and employers.

And as an employee for, I don’t know what, 35, 40, however long I’ve been working years. I never went to the DOL website. I never looked up any of that stuff.

Yeah, that’s like a poster in the. Yeah, right. You just maybe, maybe you look at it if you’ve got a problem.

But I think there’s a lot in there that, that the people can understand to be, you know, better employees and to make sure that they make better employers. So we’ve all got to help. Hold everybody.

What about the conference? SHRM conference was. Was very eye opening. I’ve done a lot of different conferences.

I’ve been at ILTA. Gosh, I don’t know how many times. Probably 17 or so over the years.

Yeah, we’ll talk about ILTA soon. Yeah, I do some personal conferences just around personal interests and whatnot. This is the first time I’ve been to Sherm.

It was enormous. It was in Chicago at the McCormick Center. Although it moves around, the one thing that really kind of blew my mind about the SHRM conference is most of the conferences that I’ve been to are pretty narrow in scope.

And you can say that about SHRM too. Right. The scope is human resources.

But I think the difference for me is the scope of organizations. I mean, there are very small organizations there and there are GEs and Coca Colas and Nvidia, all these enormous companies. And so it was tricky to sort of find all the content that was relevant to me in my role, given the size of the company.

Also, it was my first time being there, so I kind of had no idea what to expect, you know, but a lot of fun. I learned a lot this year around the background check process. What, you know, how some of those laws are changing, what kind of protections you need to give employees, what kind of notifications you need to give employees.

There was a lot of talk this year around incivility in the workplace, which is that rudeness, basically. Right. People.

People not treating each other well. Okay. And, you know, Sherm’s doing a lot of research, talking a lot about this issue right now.

There’s been a kind of a meteoric rise in incivility in the workplace over the last couple of years, which, you know, I think is really unfortunate. So what did. Were they just like, you need a code of conduct? You know, code of conduct is a piece of it.

They talk a lot about how to have different conversations, how to train folks how to disarm conversations, that sort of thing. You know, all those sort of tools that you can give people to understand when they’re in a situation that sort of isn’t appropriate in the professional context. Right.

Give them tools on, you know, how to manage that without creating more conflict. Yeah. You know, a lot of those situations, particularly if it’s already an incivil conversation.

Right. It’s probably going to get worse if you try to disengage in a abrupt way or in a way that signals a further lack of respect. And you know, I don’t know that there’s a ton of answers other than I think we all need to work on this and we need to figure out why we can’t get along so well anymore or where we can’t get along so well.

Yeah, let’s face it, there are times a business absolutely needs a new website built from scratch, done the right way, and Naming Creative can help with that. However, in some cases, you don’t need to rebuild. At Naming Creative, we specialize in transforming existing existing websites with ongoing management maintenance, SEO strategy, functionality enhancements, and performance upgrades that drive new traffic and engagement.

Do you have an existing website that you’re looking to evolve and grow? Connect with us at infonaymentcreative.com or visit our website at naimandcreative.com to get started. This interest, that’s something that’s always been a topic of some of the service management like disciplines I’ve followed. Certainly the HDI certifications talks a lot about like emotional intelligence, an emotional hijack and how to deal with it.

What gen, you know, what the signs are of an emotional hijack. What typically happens if you don’t disengage and give a little space, you know, So I feel like it’s definitely something that’s covered. Did they talk about Project Aristotle and psychological safety? I feel like that’s a topic that’s come up a few times when it comes to like, you know, psychological safety in the workplace and that kind of rudeness or whatever and how it can really impact a team’s creativity or.

Yeah, so none of my sessions focused on that. But I’ll tell you, I mean, there were hundreds of sessions. And one of the things that kind of floored me compared to some of the other conferences I participated in is like, I got to several sessions and there was no room.

Like they were so not oversold. That’s not the right word to use. But there was so much interest or enthusiasm in certain topics.

For example, there was one class, one session that was being proctored by like a hostage negotiator type person, you know, and he was talking about different mediation techniques and, you know, how to have difficult conversations and all that kind of stuff. Super duper interesting stuff. It was packed.

You couldn’t get in the room and I’m, you know, you’re actually. There was probably another 40 or 50 people outside the room kind of watching it on their phones, of which I was one. So, you know, get there early and often if you want a seat on some of this still.

Yeah. So I’m sure that there was content like that that I just, you know, didn’t get to. There’s.

There’s just so much. And that can be one of the challenges, I think, of conference. Again, as someone who probably doesn’t always do the prep I need to do on some of that stuff, you know, going through.

If you’re. If you’re going to conference and it’s your first time doing something like that, taking some time, whatever conference you’re going to, to look over the material, figuring out what kinds of things they’re offering, and sort of put together a list and four strengths and priorities. You know, sometimes you just can’t get to two sessions because they’re on opposite ends of the campus and they’re starting two minutes apart.

Right. You know, so there’s things like that that I think veteran conference goers sort of learn to do a little bit. Right.

And you. You bring up such a good point. I mean, that if you don’t do that time to, you know, you don’t take that time to do that research and see where you’re getting into, then you often kind of become just, you know, it’s easy to go to a conference and then come away with very few takeaways because you’re just kind of like following the herd.

You don’t really have a plan. But when you do your research, then you can start to see, like, what Sessions is just some business partner trying to sell their solution. Yeah.

Versus somebody that actually is giving something away of value, for sure. Although I think most of the good organizations that are out there typically do a pretty good job of that. I mean, having been a business partner in several different organizations over the years, like ilta, like the ala, I can say that, you know, most of the ones, at least that I’ve worked with, have generally done a pretty good job of, you know, managing the business partners, which.

Which can be tricky. You know, you’re asking business partners to contribute, to help the community grow, to put on events. There’s a significant investment in there.

Right. Business partners want to get something for that investment. Of course.

Right. And, you know, it’s not always like a short path. Right.

I mean, with a lot of these things, it’s about having a presence in that community and contributing to that community. Right. You know, from a professional skills perspective in terms of educating people or offering CLE credits or.

Right, right. Yeah, those sorts of things. All the way to sort of the kinds of things we’re talking about of actually getting involved in community projects and helping out.

And I think that’s the right way to build a brand. Yeah, yeah. When you talk about community, that makes me think about conferences as far as like what you get going to a conference that’s put on by a community or like some kind of nonprofit organization that exists for that community.

Right. Like an ILTA or SHRM is probably a good example. Hdi, some of the conferences I’ve been to versus a conference that’s put on by some corporation that’s really just promoting their own community.

I don’t want to badmouth anybody. Those conferences are great if you know what you’re going to get. Exactly.

They’re good. If you go into Microsoft’s conference, then you’re going to learn a lot about some Microsoft capabilities that are coming down the road. Some that are there you probably don’t know about, but you’re probably not going to necessarily get those takeaways that you can apply to like your capacity staffing model or to change your realization and collection rates or what have you.

Again, I mean, I think you kind of hit the nail on the head earlier. You got to kind of know sort of what you’re going for. And if you’re going to a Microsoft conference, you’re going for different types of professional development, different types of networking, different types of relationship building.

But equally important because number one, we have to, especially if you’re in the IT space. Right. How do we advise our customers on what they should do if we don’t know what’s out there, if we don’t know what IT can do, if we’re not looking at all the different options or solutions, it’s hard to give good guidance or advice.

Let’s talk about ILTA for a few minutes because we are having such a good time that we’re going to end up running out of time if we’re not careful. And I know that there is some SUN listeners out there that probably don’t know what ILTA is and probably some other other ones that are just waiting for us to talk about ILTA. Sure.

I’ve been an ILTA member since 2012. You’ve been a member probably a little bit longer than that long time. You’ve definitely went to more ILTA cons than I have.

It’s not cheap, but. Well, I wasn’t paying myself most of it. Yeah, certainly.

But so what, what is. If you don’t mind telling our listeners what is ilta, why would an organization get involved? Sure. So ILTA is the International Legal Technology association.

And it’s a great organization. You know, it’s sort of like you were mentioning around, around shrm. It’s really built for legal professionals, legal IT professionals, rather to have a space to work with other professionals in that who are facing the same challenges.

And it’s an incredibly supportive and diverse community. So what do I mean by that? Two things, right? Supportive in the sense that you will see messages every day on the ILTA boards from all kinds of different firms who are researching a new technology or struggling with an issue. And within moments there will be replies.

And like we were talking about earlier, not just from business partners, but from other folks who are facing those same challenges or who had and overcame those same challenges. And even the business partner content, I think in the ULTA community tends to be very focused on, you know. Yeah, we do this sort of stuff and we can help you if you need to.

But here’s the resource that you’re looking for. I’ll make you have more questions about the communities, is that there’s communities business partners can participate in and the ones they can’t. Correct.

So if you’re a member, you can go out there and say, hey, CIOs at my level with AMWOL 200 firms, what would you do? Yeah. Or you could also take that same question and send it out there to the vendors. Well, and you can ask uncomfortable questions about vendors like, hey, is anybody else having a challenge with this provider or that provider? We’ve noticed X, Y or Z.

Yeah, I think those spaces are great. ILTA is a wonderful organization. As you mentioned.

I’ve been there many, many times over the years. With K2, I had a lot of booth duty. We always had a booth.

We were on the floor and I would spend a lot of time there just meeting with customers and prospects and seeing all the different folks that I had met with and connected with over the years. This year with my new organization, we didn’t have a booth. So I kind of got a very different experience.

It was there on a business partner badge or whatever, but kind of had a different kind of way of operating, I guess, which was nice. It was cool. We focused a lot more on just sort of one on one conversations.

I mean, the really great thing about places like ILTA is you sort of know everybody’s going to be there Right. And so it’s a great place to reconnect with folks that you’ve been talking to, work with people that you’re talking about working with, and to get them connected with other folks that you’ve worked with who can be a reference for you or referral or help answer questions. So, you know, we had some great dinners with, you know, some prospects and existing clients where they can just talk
about their, you know, opportunity, their.

Their sorry relationships with us and, you know, the. The way that those have gone and get a better sense for the organization. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.

Yeah, I know that for true. I went to, like, a local chapter event that. That ILTA Central Florida chapter had hosted.

Abby, thank you. I hope I can do that again soon. But I met someone there.

They were the help desk manager of Ackerman, I think it was. And, you know, we kind of just chatted a little bit, you know, and it wasn’t like we became friends, but we. A little bit of a comfort level.

Then I ran into him at Ilticon in the cafeteria, and we ended up sitting at the. At a table together, like, trading war stories for, like, 20 minutes. That was, like one of the big highlights for me.

I went to some great sessions, but that connection was, like, incredible. Now he’s a VP at some other place. So this was so.

I. I did not go to ILTA last year because I had a gap year on purpose. It’s just fine. Yeah, we’re not going to talk about that today.

I don’t think we’ll probably run out of time. Yeah. But I loved it.

I recommend it to anybody who has the opportunity to do it. But, you know, it was great to go back this year and see all these folks that I had worked with, you know, over 20 or 30 years. And, you know, kind of that was really exciting for me, was just to be able to get around and see all these people that I hadn’t seen for, you know, a year or two because I missed an ilta.

Yeah. And, you know, it’s funny, when you do that stuff year over year, sometimes you’re like, oh, here we go again. You know.

But when you take a year off and you kind of come back to it, I. At least for me, I feel like it brought a very different energy. And, you know, I kind of felt reinvigorated by the experience. Awesome.

So. Which was nice, right? That’s, I think, what we all want to feel. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. I know I’ve made connections there that I will keep for a long Long time. And then, of course, ilta, they do more than just getting a conference together and having message boards.

Yeah. So there’s local chapters in every market. There’s all kinds of educational content, ILTA tv, all these webinars.

And they also release a survey every year. They do. Which I’m a huge fan of.

The survey just came out here recently, actually. Within the past couple of days. Yeah, I think two days ago, maybe, or a day ago.

Yeah. Yeah. And it is a super helpful survey for those of us that focus on leading legal solutions, legal technology.

Now, a lot of the survey, ask questions like, what are you using for this? You know, like, what do you use for your macro packages? What do you use to number the paragraphs in word? What do you use to redline your documents? Et cetera, et cetera. So it’s a lot of, oh, relativity, Latera, like, all these different solutions that are popular among mostly very large corporate firms. But it also asks some really good questions about, like, strategy.

What are the three things you’re worried about? What are the things you look at when you’re trying to buy a laptop or what have you? And some of that stuff is really impressive. Have you spent any time reading the survey since it came out? Yeah, I was on a plane this morning, so I had some time to kind of pour through some of it. Of course, always read through the executive summary as soon as it’s published.

The full survey, I think, is something like 300 slides. Right. So there’s a lot, A lot, a lot of data in there.

I do kind of want to. I don’t say challenge you, but, you know, one thing that I would. I would say the ULTA survey is actually pretty good for just about anybody.

I mean, the way that they break down the results of that survey, they also break it down by the size of the firms in terms of the answers. And so you get these kind of composite scores. But then you can also kind of dig down at a micro level and say, well, you know, what are the firms under 50 attorneys doing? And that’s the smallest group breakdown.

So obviously, you know, when you start to look at solo practitioners and, you know, really kind of small or boutique practices, sometimes there’s. There’s still some. Some misalignment there.

Absolutely. But I think they do a good job of trying to sort of break it down and make sure that, you know, there’s context around the answers. You know, a survey can be very misleading.

Right. Well, who responded to the survey? What are the attributes of those different responders? Like if you’re looking at a survey that’s about, that’s where all the responders or organizations very different from yours, they probably have different problems, they have different levels of resources, they have different technologies and solutions that are available to them because of cost or scope or what have you. Yeah, I think that’s a really important point, not just for the ILTA survey, but
for anything like that.

Especially in an organization where you’re trying to take some kind of a benchmark, right. Take a snapshot of your operation, compare it to that benchmark and then make changes. And you got to ask a lot of questions about where that benchmark is coming from because it may not be specific.

One of the benchmarks I use a lot, which is not a NEILTA benchmark, it’s a survey that actually comes from clio. So a lot of that data comes from surveys that they run, but the vast majority comes from subscribers of the CLIO platform for. Right.

And you know, it talks about KPIs like utilization realization and collection, but it doesn’t segment like real estate versus accident attorneys. Practice areas. Exactly.

So it doesn’t have different practice areas. It doesn’t have geographical. Yeah, right.

So because like, you know, somebody that is a full service firm in Tampa probably has very different challenges from someone that’s a full service firm in la. You know the challenges of data analysis. Yeah, absolutely.

I do like the size segments though, because. Because they’re like one attorney, one to four attorneys. Yes.

It’s a little easier for the solo and small practice firms, which is what I like to focus on Now. It’s almost 20 years of helping AmLaw, 200 firms and some SMB clients. Not a whole lot of single solo practitioners, small firms.

But I think that’s great. I mean, so you’ve been upmarket and you’ve seen kind of what the bigger organizations and you understand sort of why they do certain things. And if you can help smaller organizations to apply those same concepts and ideas in ways that work for them and help them mitigate their own risk or improve their service or expand their technology footprint in a way that empowers the business, those can all be really powerful things.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Practice areas though is. That’s an important part.

Right. Because different, especially at that size level, you get a lot of firms that specialize in one or two things and they can look very, very different from each other. If they’re involved in totally different practices.

You know, real estate and ip. It’s not going to, they’re not going to have any of the same challenges. Right? Yeah, yeah.

In the, the segmentation of like 1 to 50 and then the bigger firms, the way it is in the ULTA survey, there are some takeaways there that have been very helpful for me. Like one is DLP. And when it comes to security, like typically firms 50 attorneys are smaller.

Don’t, you know, rank DLP as a concern when it comes to security? Bigger firms do. Yeah, but that’s something that they should probably be thinking about now. 100% they’re going to be deploying Copilot365.

100%. Because DLP, if you don’t have those policies in place and you know, other kind of parallel things, you don’t have your sensitivity labels applied, etc. Like you can get in trouble with that, that Microsoft Copilot 365.

Right. If you don’t have any of those internal guardrails in place, you just deploy it. Somebody wants to go in and be like, hey, give me all the salaries of the executive team.

Do you know, it’s not going to say, right. Here they are. Right.

I think there’s a lot of challenges in that small firm space. How do you know you’re making a good investment? And so many of the technologies have now gone to the monthly subscription sort of model that the costs can be overwhelming for a lot of organizations, I think, you know, and the entry point can be so high. Absolutely.

A lot of solo practitioners can’t even get in. Yeah, yeah. Because they’re like, do you have 50 terabytes of Dyna data? Oh, I’m so sorry.

Yeah, we don’t, we don’t service and there’s not a whole lot of good, of good solutions. I mean, I think it’s evolving pretty rapidly. I think there’s one thing that, that’s clear that a lot of people, even small businesses overlook and that’s, you know, that particularly where security and cost comes into play, it’s like, well, you know, I think there’s a, there’s this idea out there that, or at least there used to be, that we can protect the data better.

Right. So we’re going to keep it local, we’ll keep it on prem. We’ll manage it all ourselves.

And while there can be some cost advantages, at least in the short term to that or in terms of refresh cycle sort of methodology versus subscription methodology, I just look at, at the end of the day, who’s got more resources to protect your data? You or Microsoft? You or Amazon? And I think you have to do it. Right, of course. And if you don’t implement your products properly, are you somebody who you knows how to do that? You can create more risk for yourself? 100%, absolutely.

But there are huge trade offs in terms of business continuity and disaster recovery and access to applications and ability to work from anywhere. And the model’s changing. Right.

And I think small firms probably be well suited to start looking at some of those tools and thinking about it. In some cases the technology’s not there for them for sure. I think about bankruptcy attorneys, there’s cloud solutions or getting there.

Yeah, some of them getting there. Well, but I mean, but there’s Also, there’s like M365, right. That’s a cloud solution.

You can get OneDrive, you can back up your data. I, I mean I think there’s a lot of ways to approach it. You don’t have to go for a full DMS and a full, you know, practice management solution and a full E discovery platform.

If you don’t need all those things, you don’t necessarily need to go and do all of those things to apply some of the concepts or methodology which is really just around how do I protect and secure my data? Well, Microsoft can do a pretty good job of that. Particularly you know, at this basic level if we’ve got a small shop and it’s relatively straightforward to manage security and permissions and access. Yeah.

And then of course there’s questions to ask too. Like if you’re going for that like best in class kind of one off solution like hey, we need a software that’s really good at metadata removal. You might want to look at, you know, what other things can I solve with more of a platform approach or a package deal? Right.

Like if my. Why would I pay for metadata removal from this provider and then do my comparison software from a different one? You could just use the same provider and maybe you get a break on that. And there are some solutions like DMS solutions that have a lot of those capabilities built in.

Like you can go the netdocuments and get ethical wall and ND compare and a lot of different features and functions. Yeah. Or you can build them on.

We’re pretty much out of time, Martin. Oh wow. We have so much fun when we get together and talk.

Hopefully we can do this again. Yeah, man. You know I would love to, but I do want to ask you about a war story.

Yeah, we didn’t get any war stories. A good one. Can you tell me.

Gosh, I wanted to do. Can you remember when but how about this one? Can you remember when you were faced with somebody slated for replacement and you advocated for investment and then they ended up being a great gym for the company, like it was worth it, you know, go into bat, keep them around, and then sure enough, days, weeks, months, years down the road, it’s paying dividends. Yeah, well, I, I feel like I’ve had a lot of those moments over the course of my career.

And, and you know, I mean, like, it can be tough when you’re in executive leadership. Sometimes you have to make really difficult decisions and you know, they’re not, they can’t always be people driven. You know, sometimes there are other elements about the health of the business and you gotta sort of do that good of the many kind of thing, right? And it’s always unfortunate.

You know, I’ve been in a couple situations where we’ve had to do some layoffs or something like that. And you know, it’s never a good, never a good feeling at all. But I can think of lots of times when I went to bat for people, present company included, over the years.

And look, I, you know, I mentioned it earlier. I think I’m a people person. I believe in investing in people.

I think everybody makes mistakes. I think with the exception of some really heinous mistakes, most should be forgiven. And if you make a mistake, once you made a mistake, learn from it, move on, be a better professional, be a better person.

If you make the same mistake over and over again, the universe is going to keep trying to teach you that lesson until you learn it. And we can’t necessarily afford for you to do that while you’re a part of our organization. There’s some trickiness in there for sure, but I can think of lots of opportunities, some of which I think I kind of caused, which I think is one of the things in a leadership position like that.

I think you’ve got to have a lot of humility. And I think if you want to do it right, and I think you’ve got to look at conditions and situations and you go, well, how did we get here? Even if there’s a failure, you know, who created that failure? And you know, I think if you’re, if you’re being honest about your leadership, you’ve got to own at least a chunk of that in almost every case. Because if somebody missed the boat badly enough that you’re thinking about making those kinds of career
altering decisions, you know, what did you miss as a leader? You know, where were you not involved in the right way to Help or to guide or to give counsel or to set expectations.

Because in my experience it’s pretty infrequent where you set out clear expectations for somebody and you give them all the tools they need to be successful and they have all the capabilities they need to be successful and they just blow out anyway. I mean, it does happen every once in a while, but even then I would argue it’s usually because people are in the wrong place. And as leaders, we have a responsibility to understand those kinds of things too.

Right. Don’t give somebody a career breaking project, you know, if they’re going through problems at home and they can’t bring their A game, you know, figure out a different way to move them forward. Figure out a different way to have that difficult conversation.

But you’re not doing anybody any favors when you set them up for failure, which is something I definitely had to learn the hard way. Yeah, I’ve done that to myself and to others before, but have also been privileged to have some really cool people on my team that weren’t afraid to call it as they saw it. And sometimes that meant, you know, looking in the mirror, changing some things.

And thankfully, more often than not, we did a better job because of it. I think that’s the cultural element. Right.

You know, if you’re, if you’re doing it right. My opinion, again, people do it a lot of different ways, but you build an organization where people, they feel comfortable sharing that information, they feel comfortable being vulnerable, they feel comfortable expressing ideas. And I don’t, you know, and all the people.

And I really, I really mean that. I’m not just trying to, you know, throw a flag to the, you know, the DEI space or what have you. But you know, there’s so much that gets overlooked when you just have one set of perspectives at the table or when you’re only hearing one set of voices at the table.

And you know, again, as leaders, I think it’s really important to figure out how do we empower people who haven’t had a voice in some of these conversations? How do we get their ideas, how do we get their context? Particularly if you’re in something like end user support or IT service, where we need to know what those people think because we’re serving those people right. And so if we don’t have their voices, if we don’t have their understanding, if we don’t have their context, well, how do we do
a good job of serving them? How do we know what they need? How do we deliver that effectively? How do we make sure that they got what they needed in order to be successful, because that’s what we’re here to do as a support organ, you know, support part of the organization. Absolutely.

This was super fun. Yeah. This is awesome.

I’m so grateful that you invited me down here for this. Yeah. Yeah.

I hope we can do it again. You know, if you want to fly down for it, I’ll make sure you get a Cuban next time. I fed him at Mazaro’s because it just didn’t work out to get that Cuban today.

That’s okay. I had a wonderful eggplant parm, which is on my list to try just about everywhere I go, and I am very happy to report that it did not disappoint at all. Awesome.

Well, thank you some listeners for joining us here today. As always, it’s been quite a pleasure to be speaking with you. Do join us here on this channel.

There’s a lot of different hosts talking about a lot of different topics. It’s not all about legal. It’s not all about it and service management.

We talk about all kind of all kind of topics about our community, about entrepreneurship, about being a good leader, a good manager, and just being happier. God, that’s really what it comes down to sometimes, you know, we could all use a little bit more happiness, especially right now. Join me again here next month.

I’m not quite sure who the guest will be. I’m expecting a couple of really good ones. I’ve got somebody from Clio coming on to talk about the survey they do for technology.

And I’ve also got probably a former partner of K2 coming on. Oh, cool. Maybe a former director of Cooley coming on.

We’ll see. Certainly some folks that say, yeah, I’ll do it, but, you know, we’re all busy. It can be tough.

Yeah. Sometimes that, yeah, I’ll do it means it’s a year from now. So, you know, but we’ll see you back here.

Thank you, Ryan. If anybody wants to get a hold of me, LinkedIn, it’s probably the best way. I’d be happy to answer any questions about what we talked about today or, you know, see if I can help you with whatever challenges you’re having.

Yeah, absolutely. Same for me. Thanks, Ryan.

Sam.