Thank you for joining me Today on the SunLeaders podcast service management section. I’m your host, Ryan Bankston of CIO Legal, and I am very excited to be joined by Keith Mecklemore today. He is an operations executive with a passion for helping people find their potential.

He has more than three decades of experience working within large international law firms. I consider myself fortunate to have been on one of his teams for several years, and I believe I’ve earned the right to say he’s a good boss and mentor. He’s also a volunteer, a soccer coach, a dad, and I’m so glad he’s here with us today.

Thank you for joining us, Gary. Keith. Well, thanks, Ryan.

I really appreciate the opportunity to have this chat with you. Yeah, this is awesome. Oh, my gosh.

I didn’t realize I’ve been doing it that long. I hear that now. It makes me feel old.

I’m feeling a little bit older every day, especially when I look in the mirror and I see a new gray hair. Or as my wife so kindly pointed out to me the other day, I have hair growing out of my ears, which she said is a milestone for feeling and being old. She was like, I remember the day my dad was like, I’m old today.

Hair’s growing out of my ears. That’s it. It’s over.

When you get to my point, you’re happy that hair is just growing. Oh, boy. So, Keith, you’ve lived in both Chicago and Denver, right? Yes, among other places.

Which one’s colder? Yes, which one’s colder? Oh, Chicago, without a doubt. I mean, I grew up in Chicago, and after I met who was to be my wife, we lived in Chicago for a year. She was not from Chicago, and after one winter in Chicago, she’s like, we are not staying in Chicago.

So, no, no hesitation at all. Chicago is by far the coldest place I’ve worked. Oh, my gosh.

Yeah, it’s brutal. I remember taking my wife to Chicago for a trip, a work trip one time. And, yeah, we turned a corner.

You know, it’s like, it’s nice and it’s okay. It’s like, oh, there’s snow on the ground. It’s beautiful.

Look at the buildings. We turn a quarter, boom, blast of that lake. Cold air.

Never again did not get her back to Chicago. I remember one time going to a meeting in what’s now called, what, Williams Tower. When I grew up, it was Sears Tower.

And the wind coming off the lake was so bad, they literally had ropes from the front door tethered out to the sidewalk. So you could almost like grab hand over hand on the ropes to try to get into the building. Wow.

Endothel Lake is just brutal. Yeah, I believe it. I’ve.

I’ve lost a hat to that. You know, I think on Franklin, North Franklin or Laselle over there, where it kind of opens up and where the river and it’s like the buildings are crowded together, they kind of open up. You’ve got that open space where the river is and the wind really whips through there.

Boy, funnels are right down the river. Yep. Yeah.

But on the same token, I’ve been in Denver and it’s been pretty cold, but that dry air seems to take some of the bite out of it. Makes it a little more bearable. Yeah.

And just the fact that it’s always so sunny, I mean, we are supposed to actually get snow today, and I imagine if we do get any, it’ll probably won’t stick around that long just because the sun shines all the time. That’s awesome. One time I was in Denver though, spending time with a friend that lived in Denver, and we left to head into the mountains where we were going to ski the next day.

We were going to stay the night there. And in less than an hour of driving, I think it went from like 60 some odd degrees, 68 some odd degrees, to like 7 degrees. Doesn’t seem extreme.

Yeah. Awesome. So you’ve spent a long time working in law firms, mostly large law firms, in the IT side, technology side, technology management side side.

So I did want to ask you what are some common technology management problems that law firms face, specifically ones you think that both large and small firms face alike? That’s a great question, Ryan, because there actually are some common pitfalls, I think, between large and small. But I think large law firms inherently seem to fall into the traps more frequently than I think the small ones. And I think that’s purely based upon resources.

I think small firms tend to not have the resources to jump in and, and make a lot of quick, abrupt technology changes. Whereas I think large law firms, they do tend to want to adopt sort of the latest technology, or at least the law firms that I’ve worked in where my, my career, there’s a desire to sort of do leading edge or bleeding ledge edge types of technologies. And so jumping right in, maybe where the desire is to get that new technology.

But really from a cultural perspective, they haven’t figured out why they want to make that change or what benefit there is behind that change. And I think that leads down, down the road to a lot of adoption problems or even a lot of implementation problems, I think. Whereas I think larger law firms, there’s just the complexity of it being a large law firm and you have offices in different locations, even different countries, disparate practice groups.

And so I think when you’re putting in a technology, you’re selecting a technology, configuring a technology, you’re trying to appease so many different entities, if you will, that it makes that technology adoption or implementation really, really difficult. Whereas I think with, with smaller firms there’s a little less, a little less complexity behind sort of, you know, making that change. So I think that’s probably one difference.

But pitfalls, back to your question. I think it’s just not really knowing why you want to make that change or why you want to make that technology implementation. Oftentimes it’s been my experience that it’s a handful of people or a handful of practice groups that are driving the desire to change and it may not be as welcome or needed elsewhere within the firm.

And so there’s just a overall reluctance or resistance to making that technology change. So that’s what I would see as kind of the common pitfalls mostly with large law firms. Cause I just don’t think smaller firms have the luxury or the complexity that makes sense.

Yeah, I’ve seen that a lot. When you’re talking about the best in class or best application for some particular use case that being driven by a practice group or a particular office. And this seems like a common story among Iltians.

When we get together at conference and we talk about change management, do you often see it where a practice group drives getting kind of that best in class application and lots of other business units across the firm have to adopt that technology? Or is it often the case that a practice group adopts something and it only really affects them? Like does it does that their drive to have that best in class, does it really impact the entire firm or are they able to kind of contain it within their
practice group? That’s a great question. I, I think it depends upon one, the practice group and two, the technology. But I would say more than likely that change really just affects the practice group because it’s, it hasn’t been my experience that you have say a practice come in and want to make a wholesale change that universally affects the entire firm.

So for example, like, like if a patent and IP group wanted to get a patent docketing system, it’s really just a platform that’s for their purposes. Now what I have seen is, for example, some practice group maybe wants to implement something that goes up against maybe a firm policy. And just in simplistic terms, let’s just say a firm really has a policy.

And I know this isn’t realistic example because most firms are in the cloud, but let’s just say for the sake, sake of example, a practice group wanted something that was a hundred percent in the cloud and so that would be against maybe a policy that the firm would have in place that would cause some friction and probably some negotiation among firm leadership. That is something I have seen where there’s a wholesale sort of conflict of the way things have been done universally in the past for the
firm. The other thing that I’ve seen to your, to your practice group question is if a practice group sort of has, I’ll call them fiefdoms, meaning there’s a strong unit within a practice group, maybe in one office or one region, and maybe there’s a similarly another strong unit in a different region.

And if one region really wants a particular technology, that the other region doesn’t want it. And so that times that sometimes can get really interesting when you know which is the, which group sort of decides for the entire practice group what platform or what technology they want to adopt. Similarly, if a firm merges or brings on board a practice group from another firm where they maybe have become very accustomed to using a particular technology and policies and practices and they go into a
new place and maybe that firm does, hasn’t adopted that, or has a completely different procedure or process or technology.

And so sometimes that creates fiction. But I haven’t seen many instances where a practice group will, you know, be the tail wagging the dog, if you will, or they really come in and make wholesale changes, except if that leadership in that practice group maybe overall has a firm wide leadership responsibility. So for example, if somebody in that practice group was chair of the technology committee, if you will, they may have a little bit more leverage over the entire firm to maybe make a wholesale
change.

Is there, is there like a strategy or are there best practices to manage this? Because it sounds to me like it could get pretty messy. Well, I think you really need to know, you know, you have to have good policies and procedures. I think that’s, that’s paramount.

And I think, and to that end, I think you have to have a good process behind why you’re maybe making that change or why you’re making that purchase. You know, Ryan, you, you, you worked for me previously. Oftentimes when these sorts of discussions come up, I’m like, what business problem are we trying to solve? What’s the problem we’re trying to solve here? And if, if we struggle with answering that question, then often was informative to me that maybe we, we don’t know what we’re trying to do
here or maybe this isn’t the right decision for us.

And so I think it was always really important to sort of answer what are we trying to do here? What, what business issue or problem or what, what are our requirements? If we’re really getting down to sort of, you know, like RFP type talk. But like, what, what are we trying to solve here by bringing in the service or bringing in the software or making this change? Because if we can’t address that or if that we ultimately doesn’t address those things, then it’s kind of setting it up for failure.
Yeah, that makes sense.

And it makes me think too about. You said policies and procedures are the answer here, and I imagine that’s something that a lot of large firms have in abundance, I would hope. But small firms, maybe not so much when it comes to policies and procedures that are well documented and followed.

What advice would you give them when they’re struggling with these type of technology questions? Well, it’s never too, it’s never too late or too early to, I think, sit down and figure out what your policies and procedures are. I mean, it, and it doesn’t need to be anything very complicated where you’re filling up a notebook of pages and pages of rules, regulations. I mean, it can be a, a strategic business decision that your, your, your organization maybe wants to decide.

Like, okay, you know, in 2025, we are at least going to start exploring, maybe moving certain things to the cloud or, you know, more timely today is we’re going to explore looking into using AI, like really setting some parameters. So I think my advice to smaller firms are kind of deciding what you want to be and deciding what your level of comfort is as far as change. If you’re not comfortable or maybe your client base isn’t comfortable with a particular change, then you’re probably not ready to
adopt whatever technology or service that might push you away from that comfort level.

That would be my advice. So getting in sort of specific examples, if I were a smaller firm, and let’s just say, for example, they forever had email on prem, and maybe they weren’t comfortable going off prem and putting the email in cloud, like that would be, I think, a gating factor if, if somebody come to them said, hey, we need to make a move to, to moving your email to the cloud. I think that would be a discussion that the company would have to have and firm leadership.

I’m like, what are the pros and cons to moving? Why is it we were reluctant to move? Okay, are we, are we okay with the risks now that we know that lots of other companies do it? Here’s the, the ramifications to moving, here are the benefits to moving, etc. So I think you just need to know thyself, know what you’re comfortable with and know what level of risk you’re comfortable with if you were to make that change from what you’ve been doing historically. Yeah.

Also I would say be mindful of the resource draw that decision may make. Meaning, let’s say you move to a completely different technology, yet nobody within your organization has experience in that technology. Well, you’re either going to have to invest in your existing resources to train them on it, or you’re going to have to add headcount to, you know, be knowledgeable to be able to support should something arise with that technology.

So I think that’s something, you know, there’s always that hidden cost that I think surprises people, surprises firms. You know, I, I’ve done, you know, wholesale financial system migrations from complete one different platform to another, document management systems, docketing. And that’s always sort of the afterthought is the, oh gosh, we don’t have anybody who’s adept at being an administrator in Imanage in the cloud or adorant or you know, 3E.

So you need to do that in conjunction with when you’re making that change. Yeah, that makes sense. I’ve seen that.

I’ve certainly seen that hidden cost or that surprise. It’s kind of an afterthought, not well planned for. I’ve seen it time and again, large and small.

It feels like sneakier on the small end though. I’ve definitely seen it where smaller practices think, okay, this technology is going to solve my problems, I’m going to buy it, we’re going to put it in place and all the problems then go away. And they don’t think about the changes to their own, like work habits, whether it’s extra clicks or different steps to accomplish some of the same things they’ve been doing day in and day out or how their staff has to learn new technology and it can get
pretty messy then and sometimes, worst case, new technology that’s bought and paid for doesn’t really get used.

Oh, that’s Always unfortunate to see, but. But it’s good to know that there’s a solution, Keith. Hopefully there’s a solution.

Well, there’s always a solution. Just may not be apparent right away. Awesome.

Well, I wanted to ask you also about outsourcing. Outsourcing, I feel like that’s one of those things that the definition of it, or kind of my definition of outsourcing has changed over time. Over time in my career.

Would you say it’s the kind of the same for you? Like what was outsourcing like 20 years ago? So I would say outsourcing previously very. What’s the word? It was more of the back office. I mean really the back office.

Like so early in my career I worked for a large law firm in Chicago and I had the opportunity to be the contract administrator for that firm. And that meant I was responsible for all of our outsourcing agreements. And at the time, this firm decided to outsource things like reprographics, mailroom, trial support and help desk.

And that was pretty unique back then. Not a lot of law firms are going in, into that space and there weren’t a lot of vendors in that space. I remember the vendor that we had selected, this was sort of a new thing for them.

Their bread and butter was mailroom. But taking on these other functions was pretty new. So I think it has evolved.

Those vendors are still in this space, but I think you’re starting to see more and more players in this space. Where I think you’re seeing law firms now are much more comfortable outsourcing. And outsourcing a lot of those same functions that I talked about early on, 20 years ago, but there’s just more options and I think there’s a lot more specialized vendors.

Whereas back then it was this mega, mega company that I think tried to please. The law firm that I’d worked for were saying, well, of course we can do this and this and this. But really the bread and butter was mailroom and printing, Whereas now I think there’s so many vendors.

You know, just think about just in the help desk space, there’s dozens. There’s dozens of them now. So I think that’s how it’s evolved is, you know, people have sort of seen the opportunity in these other firms and grown and I think firms willingness to outsource.

That makes sense. You know, when you’re talking about the. Those different functions that were outsourced, I was thinking about the difference between some of those where it’s a very specialized skill set that’s applied at A very specific place like the cases in litigation, trial dates, et cetera, as opposed to other, that are other positions which tend to be more entry level, high turnover, lots of training, lots of careers start here type positions where you kind of get that maybe a larger
headcount, a lot of new faces, people come in, stay in the role for a year or two, a couple of years, and then tend to move on to different roles like mailroom and help desk, which, that’s not to say that’s everybody’s experience in those positions, but I think often we do think about those as kind of career starter positions, turnovers, something you come into to like get your foot in the door in a certain industry or type of work and then move into something else.

Right, right. I think that’s a really good point because I think that’s why you’re seeing a lot of companies grow in this space. Because I think, well, just thinking of large law firms, or actually this might apply to smaller law firms, they don’t want to be in the business of constantly hiring and training sort of the entry level position.

So outsourcing, that makes a lot of sense. Um, yeah, so I think that’s a really good point. Right, yeah.

Thank you. Well, that was a, that’s a pretty cool experience. I was thinking too about, you know, years ago when I first got started in the business, I was working for a service provider that was help outsourcing, help desk and kind of the internal culture there at the time, which had, it’s went through a lot of changes since I worked there.

But at the time there was definitely conversations about, you know, we’re taking jobs away from people that do what we do inside the firms, you know, and it’s like if a firm brings us on and their help desk people are usually being like, let go or maybe they’re, you know, coming on board with us and it’s kind of like changing something for them. So we’re like a mark of this change. But I also, at the time when I was younger, like in high school and college ages, I always heard of outsourcing and
thought it was more international, kind of offshore outsourcing, and hadn’t thought a lot about how it’s often, you know, local businesses that you’re outsourcing to, you know, a more immature understanding of it all.

So I was, I was kind of proud to be in a position in Atlanta, a US based business business that was outsourcing as opposed to like an offshore call center, you know. So my, my experience was definitely quite a Bit different, you know, from, from yours being inside the firm, being the, the one that’s outsourcing that work to, to the, to the outfit like that I was working for, you know. But it, it, it got me to think and something that we’ve talked about a lot, alignment with culture.

And over the years, how have you balanced the internal culture of your teams with the external client facing culture of your firm? Well, that’s a good question. I think, I think your team has to be the embodiment of the firm culture because if, no, if people aren’t sort of all universally believing in the same mission, then I think you’re gonna have a lot of conflict and a lot of, I, I think it, it, it will manifest itself in not doing a good job for your customers. So I think it’s imperative to
really understand overall what the company culture is and build your team to embody that same culture.

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How do you make sure that your mission and the culture of your team and the business outcomes you serve are all aligned? Well, I think that’s that, that’s the, that’s the million dollar question, isn’t it? If it’s misaligned, then you’re going to have unhappy customers. You’re, you’re probably not going to hit your goals. You might be looking for a job depending upon where you miss, but I think that’s the million dollar question.

And you know, back to sort of the outsourcing piece, I think finding a partner and you’ve probably, you know, I’m sure you’ve heard me talk about this a lot in the past was it’s really important to find a partner who buys into your company culture because if your MSP is driven and motivated by one thing that is completely different than what your company’s mission is, then you’re, they’re constantly going to be in conflict. I mean, you recall when we worked together, you know, I, I think, I think
people thought I was a little batty in wanting to have so many, we had so much more headcount than what all the metrics said we should have. Because I, I was deliberate about wanting to overstaff on the outsource side because internally in our organization, they wanted the best possible customer service they could receive.

And in my mind, the best possible customer service didn’t translate to calling and leaving a voicemail and waiting for somebody to call back, or emailing and waiting for somebody to call back. I wanted to have people available so that when somebody called, somebody answered the phone. And so to me, that sort of desire to marry up the, the main company with the outsourced vendor company, the cultures and sort of staff it and sort of structure the contract and the performance metrics accordingly was
paramount to the success.

Because conversely, if we had a vendor, if we picked a vendor who was just volume, they, they were, they were driven by volume, driven by number of tickets and closed tickets. They’re not incentivized to answer the phone when the phone rings. They’re just, they’re disincentivized to, you know, respond to the ticket.

And that, to me, didn’t feel like it did justice to the culture of the main organization, which I worked for. Got it. And so to make sure I’m hearing you correctly, structuring the contract and like the, the performance indicators and metrics by which you’re measuring its success, its service level agreements, et cetera, really important to getting that right, if I’m hearing you correctly.

So looking at a contract, it’s one thing, you go in with a vendor, you have a conversation about what you’re trying to accomplish, but when you look in the contract and you see how they’re measuring that success and you structure it in a mindful way to make sure the measurement that you’re essentially both measuring success in the same way. Right. I’m hearing you correctly there and that there’s not a mismatch where you’re measuring success by availability.

Average wait time, for instance, how long does somebody have to wait before a call is answered? How often does a call not get answered? Do you have to leave a voicemail? Those type of measurements, as opposed to how many tickets is each person working or how many tickets do we do for the month, et cetera, making sure that the measurements connect to your goals when it comes to service level agreements, and that really made a difference in a successful alignment. That’s perfectly said, Ryan. You
know, basically the measurements of how the team is doing need to tie back to the culture of the company.

What’s the saying? Measure what matters. So you’re measuring the Things that are important. And so customer service we deemed as being very, very important.

Therefore, we structured the measurements and we structured the, the contract in accordance with making sure we delivered the best possible customer service. And the measurements you connected to that was if the phone was answered, how long it took for it to be answered, et cetera, what are some other measurements that tied to that for you? Well, I think the, you know, actually resolving the problem and then just, you know, this kind of a no duh type of thing, but just overall satisfaction. And in
the customer satisfaction, do you feel like it was resolved, was resolved timely? Would you be willing to call back? How did you rate their service if they didn’t solve it? Were they at least friendly? Were they helpful? Did they try to get you the information? Did they follow up, like certain things that, you know, setting aside the law firm environment, we’ve all called banks or whomever.

Like, do you feel like even if they didn’t help you initially, did you come away feeling like they, they cared about you, that they, they, they, they made you feel like your problem was important and they were trying their best to help you? Uh, so those were sort of the measurements too. So overall, you know, from a not a ticket perspective, but the user who called the help desk, did they feel like they were cared about? That was a metric as well, right? That measurement of their experience and
satisfaction? Yeah, that’s, that’s wonderful. Um, I mean there’s plenty, there’s like a whole science when it comes to metrics and key performance indicators, leading and lagging indicators, how they connect to each other, crafting those into your contract and SLAs and making sure they work for you.

But I really like the way you’re framing it where you’re saying, okay, what are we trying to accomplish? How do we measure performance to get a good idea of are we accomplishing that? And then how do we put it in a contract, get everybody on the same page? I think so often on the smaller end. And maybe this is even with big firms too. A contract, like a vendor contract that comes across that’s got these metrics, that’s got these SLAs, they tend to be built around some type of a framework on kind
of a general one fits all or industry best practices, like, oh, you’ve got a help desk contract and you probably need your telephone answer right in there and you know, all these different metrics that should be in there because that’s what a help desk contract should have.

But what do they really mean? Like what does their Measurements really mean for you, for your business, for your firm? How do they tell a story about your goals and whether or not you’re getting there? I think that part is what is missed so often. And maybe it’s because all of the metrics together, all the KPIs, the frameworks, what have you, some of them have certifications behind them or these big thick books. Right.

And they can be kind of intimidating. But sometimes it’s just like a couple of them is all you need, Right. Like a Net Promoter score or that csat, which, you know, CSAT is, were you satisfied with this interaction that you just had? Yes or no, or the Net Promoter scores? Would you recommend this service to one of your friends or family members? And you know, knowing how that’s like the science, the behavior behind that scoring and how it affects your mission is so important to successful
relationship.

And it certainly makes things a lot easier to manage when the contract’s set up. Right. And then you can just manage to that agreement.

Right, right. Makes it a lot easier for the folks that deliver day in and day out. Right.

And it’s easier for both parties, honestly, you know, because if the contract is not geared that way or structured that way, the customer is going to be unhappy because the staff is not doing what the customer wants and therefore they’re going to be banging on the vendor and the vendor is going to be like, well, contractually this is, you know, we’re doing what we said we’d do. So I think it’s really important the contract. Right.

The other thing, you said something earlier, Ryan, about when companies migrate from, you know, in house to outsourcing. You know, I have had the experience a couple times with not just help desk, but trainers and other, other services like office folks, you know, like back office folks, mailroom, going from in house to outsourcing, that. And it’s oftentimes a bit of a culture shock because people, you know, these are people, these are people that are in the offices.

Years ago, we all used to go in the office. Now today, not as much, but, you know, you, you developed relationships with those people. You know, you got to know their families and their stories and, you know, sometimes they bring their kids into work and bring your kids to work day and things like that.

So you had those relationships and it was often really traumatic when you decided to outsource. You know, did that mean, you know, Bill and Sally were going to no longer be in the mail room or, you know, that type of thing? And, and so structuring those agreements for Those people, so they, you know, change basically who they’re working for, but they’re still there is sometimes really valuable, I feel, but also sort of trying to encapsulate sort of the service that. That, you know, that Bill and
Sally provided with the new vendor is super important because I think it smoothed that transition because people get accustomed to, like, so and so always did it the way I liked it, and I. And, you know, am I going to get that same service? I mean, I think it’s really, really important to not fall in the trap of we’re making this change financially or whatever the reason is.

It needs. You need to be very careful when you do make that change that you don’t lose the fidelity of those relationships and what made those relationships special. I think that’s really, really important.

When you select that vendor, when you negotiate the terms of that agreement, you staff it up like that, you really. It needs to become that valued partner. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

I mean, it’s so important. So many little functions of any business in law firms contribute to the end result. Right.

And sometimes the little things I know in an office environment can mean so much for someone’s day, whether they’re having a good day or a bad day, whether or not they’re happy. So. Yeah, well said, Keith.

Well, we’ve only got a few more minutes to chat, and I did want to take a couple of minutes to chat about ilta, which I have talked about a lot on this podcast, International Legal Technology Association. But you and I have both been members for a while. You’ve been encouraging me to get involved with an ILTA group recently, which I think I may be taking you up on.

I love ilta. It’d be nice to hear your feelings about ILTA after all these years. We haven’t gone to con together, but there’s still time.

The technology survey came out not too long ago. Have you had a chance to look at it or read it yet? I did. There’s always some really good nuggets in there.

Yeah. Yeah. Did anything stand out to you? Well, I had a few things, but I want to be mindful of how much time we have left, so I’ll.

I’ll pick with you a few little, like, really important things or things that. That jumped out at me. One was, so I’m currently transitioning.

I’m in between jobs. So I’ve been interviewing a lot over the last several months, and it never surprises me that people always ask me in these interviews, what do you think about AI and so I wasn’t surprised to see, wasn’t surprised to see how much AI was a focus in the survey. But what stood out to me was how AI tools are going to be used in the next 12 months.

And the way, you know, if you’re not familiar with the survey, the survey breaks it down by firm size. And so, you know, no surprise, smaller firms, meaning like under 50 attorneys, there’s a real reluctance to use AI, whereas the bigger firms, a lot of them have jumped right in and are using it. So that was interesting to me, since this is just a topic that I’m asked about in all my interviews that I’ve been having, sticking in sort of the managed service space.

One of the things we looked at previously when I was, you know, we had outsourced help desk and training group, we really were pushing the use of chatbots. And I was surprised in the survey, really. There’s just not a lot of uptick in use in chatbots.

And I get it, you know, when you call, you want to talk to somebody. So I totally get that when you text, you want to make sure it’s a human being. But I, I’m surprised more firms haven’t adopted chatbots more.

For some really basic things that are just quick little, like using the help desk example, like I need my password reset or I need access to a document and a document manager says little things like that that, you know, through some automation, through some AI and maybe some chatbot technology, these would be super simple to, I think, address. And I was surprised more especially larger law firms haven’t. Haven’t utilized chatbots more.

Yeah, I was surprised. Maybe this is a little bit of PTSD speaking, because in my 30 years, as you said, I’ve done several accounting system changes. Those tend to be really painful projects.

They’re very complex, they’re very involved, they touch everything and everybody. I was really surprised to see the number of firms that are looking to make, you know, changes in accounting systems. Cause those are big, big projects.

Let’s see. Another one that jumped out at me was conference room technology. You know, traditionally it’s always been like the Ciscos and Life Sizes.

It’s really interesting to see how much Microsoft Teams has penetrated that market. That one was. That’s interesting to me.

And then the final two, again, sticking with sort of managed services. I’m surprised there hasn’t been, there hasn’t become more dominant software when it comes to remote control software. It just seems like it’s all over the board.

Firms are using just so Many different things. And I’m just really surprised there hasn’t become one dominant software. I was thinking about that just the other day.

Yeah. About like, well, I got started, was like goto Assist, I think was the. Was a big one in vnc.

You know, you connect your vpn, use vnc, you never see that anymore. You know, I think go, go to Assist. It’s.

I don’t, I think they, somebody like Citrix had them at one point. I don’t even know what they are now. So.

Right. So I thought, you know, for. Especially now, since we’re so distributed and people are working remote, I’m surprised there hasn’t become more dominant solutions in the marketplace.

And then no surprise, you know, we talk about all these other little different vendors and whatnot, but everybody’s still Microsoft, everybody’s still Cisco, everybody’s still sort of on the mega, the mega legal tech firms of, you know, Imanage, Thompson, LexisNexis. So. Right.

You know, having looked at the survey, having filled out the survey for years, there’s interesting sort of oddities, but at the end of the day, it’s still. Everybody’s still on the same stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It is pretty neat. The like, AI section that the survey has this year, which is new this year, it’s like the last year’s survey, AI was kind of a new thing. There was a lot of hype about it at Khan, but it hadn’t really entered the survey too much.

And then this year it’s a whole section talking about it. But, gosh, everybody’s been talking about AI and been talking about it a lot and sometimes it seems like it’s really noisy because there’s so many voices. There’s so many startups that pop up with a good idea or get bought up by somebody else or they have to change direction because some other major developer announces their product and up, lo and behold, that’s what you were building, going to change directions.

So it’s definitely a, it’s a, it’s a crazy discussion. So it’s nice to have, you know, these kind of measurements come out of the survey to see what other people are thinking. Whether.

Because some of these questions in the, the survey, I talked about this in the last episode, they’re very, you know, what do you use for this? Oh, we use Office, we use Latera, we use Adorin, whatever. But other ones are like, what are your three largest technology annoyances? Or like you said, where do you think AI is? You know, what are we going to be using AI for over the next year and some of those solutions, those kind of strategic or just kind of brainstorming type what’s everybody thinking?
Questions are really cool to see and really helpful and the segmentation too, that was something that stood out to me and I guess this can be kind of our parting, our parting comments here since we’re running out of time, but a couple of things that stood out to me that like big firms in, in, in this survey, big firms are 50 attorneys or larger and small firms are 50 attorneys and smaller, which I’m sure there’s a few four to five attorney firms that think a 40 attorney firm is giant. But
regardless, I was curious about how when asking questions about like what are these annoyances or what are your security concerns? I was surprised that information governance wasn’t something that the smaller firms tend to pay attention to a lot, but all of the big firms paid a lot of attention to and the same kind of related but in security DLP or down loss prevention was something that the smaller firms tended to not think about a lot but all the bigger firms spent a lot of time thinking about.

How does that ring to you, Keith? Like does that sound that surprising? Like why do you think smaller firms don’t really pay that much attention to information governments and dlp? Should they Short answer would be yes, but I know that’s not very compelling for a podcast and that was actually a question I was going to ask you because I know in your, your role right now with your consultancy, you’re talking to a lot of smaller companies and I was going to ask you because that was one that jumped
out to me me was, I mean coming from working with large law firms, I mean that’s a non starter, you know, document security retention policies around that data loss prevention. I mean clients demand it. So I, I’d be curious what you’ve been hearing with some of your clients because I, I was trying to think like is it a resource thing? Is it just clients not asking for it? Like what’s the driver behind it not being a topic? Well, I think clients often do drive those kind of demands for firms, you
know, for compliance standards, you know, like hey, you know, we’re going to need you to be ISO or you know, SOC or whatever compliant.

So I think that often will that’s often the catalyst for a firm’s, you know, kind of roadmap or their, their maturity level as they’re cruising along with what do I need for my insurance policy to oh, what do I need? Because this client just made a requirement in our contract or what have you, you know, but I think that does kind of drive that kind of compliance and framework. It’s like, what does the bar say I need to do? What do I need to do to carry this insurance and get the best rate? And
then what does this client say I need to, to do? You know, so it’s kind of reactive, you know, and I think that it is certainly because of resources. Smaller firms, typically the folks that are making the money that are actually practicing the law are getting very little time to do it because they’re spending so much time, you know, in admin activities or doing, you know, non billable activities, kind of running the business of the firm.

Then they’ve got so much time to actually practice law on behalf of their clients or do the, you know, deliverables. And then it’s like after all of that is when you can kind of put some thought into this kind of strategic, you know, like, well, how’s the firm set up when it comes to information governance? You know, it’s like, well, they still have families to get to, they still have to eat at lunch. So I think it is definitely, it’s resource driven and a lot of the vendor relationships that they
cultivate are kind of transactional.

You know, give me this laptop, you know, service my printer. But they don’t really have kind of those strategic advisors that are dedicating time to that firm. It seems like a lot of that strategic advice tends to come out of their community like their bar associations or if they’re fortunate enough to have an administrator at the ala.

You know, not many of those firms have like a CIO that’s a member of ilta. Look me up at CIO Legal if you want one. So the, so there’s nobody like sitting down with them and saying, so what does information governance mean to you at your firm and what do you do, you know, for.

For dlp? Like how do you keep people from stealing all your stuff when they want to jump ship and start a firm with their buddy? Yeah. But hey, these are all great questions and things I love talking with you about and audience out there. If you’d like to talk with us about it, you can find me at CIO Legal or at SunLeaders.

Keith, where’s a good place for folks to come find you if they want to ask you some questions about these wonderful topics? Probably best way to reach me would either be look me up on LinkedIn or you can shoot me an email at KMC l e m o rmail.com all right. Wonderful. Wonderful.

Well, some listeners will be seeing you out there. And Keith, I hope you have a wonderful day. Thank you.

Thanks, you, too. This is great. Enjoyed it.

Thanks for asking me, Sam.