Introduction: 0:00

• Introducing Joe Green, Chief Innovation Officer at Gunderson Dettmer and Co-founder and Director of the Open Cap Table Coalition.
• Serving as Fund Advisor to the Legal Tech Fund, Board Advisor to Vikk AI and Aumni, and more.
• Debating whether the billable hour is a thing of the past.

Moving into a tech advisor role at Gunderson Dettmer after a career start at Simpson Thacher: 2:11

• Exploring the legal side of personal interests through pro bono work. 
• Getting recruited to join Gunderson Dettmer before you were aware New York has a tech scene.
• Drawing interest from first-time entrepreneurs who recognized he had more operational experience to share.

Moving away from the standard legal path at Thomson Reuters: 5:38

• Moving laterally into legal publishing when all of your peers are pursuing partner roles.
• Considering a future in academia, publishing in law reviews, and applying for neuroscience phD programs.
• Using a writing opportunity to explore where you want to take your career.

Taking on side hustles that pull you towards tech and product: 8:43

• Working with a manager who lets you pursue business and product-related projects.
• Stepping into board advisory roles outside of his regular work.
• Finding creative ways of achieving your goals through the flexibility that isn’t available to practicing lawyers.

Founding the Open Cap Table Coalition: 11:59

• Organizing a leading group of law firm reps to develop a standardized cap table for tracking corporate ownership.
• Scaling the organization from ten to more than fifty members and being listed as a trade organization.
• Inviting participation from engineers through open source.
• Aligning stakeholders from competing law firms because everyone shared the pain of a core problem.

Rejoining Gunderson Dettmer and moving into the CIO role: 18:04

• Staying connected with Gunderson peers as he wrote about industry trends at Thomson Reuters and realizing they were tackling the same challenges.
• Finding reassurance that he would be given the leeway to truly innovate in his role.

Challenging the billable hour model: 20:56

• Emphasizing the importance of differentiating quality and delivering services effectively.
• Acknowledging that technology is not quite ready to offer drastic change.
• Leaving behind painful, busy work so lawyers can focus on more compelling tasks.

Leading and launching innovative projects: 30:06

• Adopting a philosophy about when to license software and when to build it internally.
• Launching Chat GD, an AI product that allows his legal staff to update documents using AI.
• Taking a swing at projects that aren’t on your roadmap.

Shifting from a legal to a technical mindset: 33:44

• Forefronting legal process management as their primary product.
• Possessing the experience to know what parts of the legal process are broken.
• Spending time considering legal problems.

Discussing the influx of investment into legal tech: 37:20

• Building legal technology during a time when VCs have turned their attention to the field.
• Seeing every software company as a future AI company.
• Predicting more capital and investment.

Predicting the future of legal services: 41:06

• Looking beyond AI to consider who law firms will expand their services.
• Reframing the expectations of what law firms are capable of.

Book Recommendations: 43:41

• Leading Professionals: Power, Politics, and Prima Donnas by Laura Empson.
• Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (And How to Take Advantage of It) by William Poundstone.
• Finding Joe’s yet-unpublished writing on the Social Science Resource Network.

What you wish you’d known as a young lawyer: 45:40

• Considering the idea that successful people wake up in the morning happy to go to work.
• Recognizing that people with jobs they love had no idea those roles existed when they were in school.
• Forging a non-linear path as you search for roles that make you happy.