Intro Music

Tyler Finn 

What does 2025 hold for legal tech? How about the legal ops profession? Today we are joined on the abstract by two of my friends, two community builders for a slightly different episode. I'm joined by Matt Wheatley, Kevin Cohn, if you don't know them. Kevin is the chief customer officer for Bright Flag and I'm gonna read my summary of what you guys do,but you are welcome to.

Kevin Cohn

Do it, do it.

Tyler Finn

BrightFlag is an intuitive AI-powered e-billing and matter management solution that provides your team with complete visibility into legal work and spend. Matt is the VP of client strategy at Priori, a global talent marketplace that's connecting organizations with the right talent for their legal work.

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Matthew Wheatley‍

Nailed it.

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Tyler Finn‍

How'd I do?

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Kevin Cohn

Yeah, I mean, your words sound suspiciously like our words.

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Matthew Wheatley 

Did you take them from our website?

Kevin Cohn‍

From your website?

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Tyler Finn

I might have.

Kevin Cohn‍

Crazy digital native over here.

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Tyler Finn

This is gonna be a little different. We're gonna have a conversation about trends that we're seeing, opinions that we have, things that we're looking forward to. And I always want feedback on these episodes but I will also say honestly please give me feedback on this because if you like this I will do more like this with other cool people like Kevin and Matt.

Kevin Coh‍

Does that exist?

Matthew Wheatley

It's a pretty high bar.

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Tyler Finn

I might have to go outside the New York City metropolitan area to find them. 

Alright let's get started. Okay, Kevin, you just got back, world traveler, from Bright Flag's Customer Advisory Board meeting and yearly kickoff in Ireland. How did that go?

How did that set the tone for the year? How do you feel about 2025? 

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Kevin Cohn

So I got the flu.

Tyler Finn‍

Oh, 

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Matthew Wheatley

you are good, by the way.

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Kevin Cohn

That's true. Thank you.

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Matthew Wheatley 

After you're on the flu.

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Kevin Cohn

It's all the makeup that you gave me right before we started off. No, so, you know, I travel a ton. Last year, 2024, I traveled all but eight weeks of the year, I think. So, it was very intense. It was rough, but a great way to kick off the year. So, every year we bring the entire company to Dublin and this was the first year, that I also brought the entire customer advisory board. We've got a great customer advisory board with a lot of people who give us incredible insight and also challenge us in the best possible ways. But the actual customer advisory board meeting was the very last day of what ended up being 

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Tyler 

Whoa. 

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Kevin Cohn

Normally, I travel a lot, but normally it's for one day, two days, maybe five days, 11 days, and it was after three weeks of not having traveled, the only time in 2024 when

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Kevin Cohn

I went three weeks without traveling, and I was dragging. But I rallied, and it's great to be in a room with all of these customers, legal operations leaders, getting this kind of feedback, and also coming off of the year that we had, 2024 was by far our biggest and best year. So we had the entire company there, the entire cab there, everybody learning a lot from it. It was fantastic and it didn't rain.

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Kevin Cohn

And if you've ever spent five days in Dublin in January without getting rains on, you are winning. So…

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Tyler Finn 

Luck of the Irish, one might say.

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Kevin Cohn 

I didn't leave feeling that lucky because I brought the sick back with me, but that was a great way to kick off the year. 

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Tyler Finn 

Do you all have a customer advisory board?

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Matthew Wheatley

We do.

It's phenomenal.

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Tyler Finn 

Do you bring them together? I'll use this as a little bit of research for myself. We have an advisory board, which I view as a different thing than a customer advisory board.

Do you feel like that’s a useful group for your business

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Matthew Wheatley

Yeah, yeah it’s extremely helpful to get people who are using your product together in a place where they feel like they can be maybe a little more critical than they might be able to and just a one to one customer interaction so because you know they  you are there to het their feedback and I think it makes people feel like they're more part of the brand So you strengthen your relationships with them with people in their network. So it's been, having a customer advisory board has been a really core part of our go-to-market strategy for the past couple of years.

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Tyler Finn 

I think there's something to be said also for getting folks in the same room. Like when I was standing up our advisory board with other people in the business, I didn't do it all by myself, but it was, we're gonna bring this group together once a quarter and have them meet and have them talk to each other. I think people feel a little bit more free, like you're saying, to share things that maybe are a little bit critical about the product or what your strategy looks like and the roadmap looks like when they're all in the room together and sort of feeding off of each other as opposed to one person talking to the chief product officer or one person talking to the CEO.

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Matthew Wheatley

And I think there's also, that's that, but also like, people want to meet each other in these settings too. Like, it's partly about Bright Flag or Priori, but I think that there's a lot of conferences, a lot of them are huge, like thousands of people, and people who are in similar positions, it's hard to have kind of little pods where they can network. I don't know if you've seen that with your advisory board. They like to spend time with each other in smaller groups.

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Kevin Cohn 

Yeah, I think also, so the way that I structured it is there are 10 members and it's 12-month term, so it runs July through June. 

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Tyler Finn 

That's pretty short, actually. 

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Kevin Cohn 

Yeah, and that gives us an opportunity to get different perspectives, but it also gives the customers an opportunity to say, hey, I'm entering a really, really busy period. I've got to peel off, or they might change jobs, and they're no longer a customer, or

they're moving to a new customer organization. but meets once a quarter and one of those four times a year we do it in person. And what I have felt from the very first time that we did it was a sense of ownership and being on the journey that, you know, I feel from customers pretty regularly, but not to this degree. And on this day in particular, so this past Friday, There were conversations about what we can do to put, what BrightFlight can do to put itself in an even stronger competitive position. And normally when you're having a conversation with customers, they're actually coming at it from the perspective of what can you do to put me in a better position, 

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Tyler Finn 

Right

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Kevin Cohn 

which is what I want to focus on Is how to make them more successful. But it crossed into a different kind of ownership in this setting, which was rewarding for me. I think it was rewarding for them. I'm sure it was, because they all emailed me afterwards. So, yeah, strongly, I mean, if you don't have a customer

advisory board, I think that you're missing out, because there's so many benefits from it.

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Tyler Finn 

It's on our roadmap. Is it? Maybe even doubly so now. Yeah, I'm committing to it publicly now.

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Matthew Wheatley

I would definitely recommend it. I'm curious, when you think about content and programming for your advisory board meeting, one of the things we think about is how can we make this broadly interesting for them and not just purely about Priori or Bright Flag? Was it all Bright Flag content all day?

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Kevin Cohn 

Jeez, you're going to make me give up all the secrets now. 

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Matthew Wheatley

That's why you're on record here. 

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Kevin Cohn 

So we start off the same way every time. First of all, I said there are 10 customer members, but then there are four BrightFlag members, so I'm the permanent member, and then there are three rotating members,and that gives me an opportunity to expose other people on the team to that kind of a setting and to expose the customers to other people on our team. So the first few minutes are spent with introductions and maybe an icebreaker. Then I give an update on what's happened with BrightFlag. You know, this is a safe space where I can say, you know, this is how we grew, these are some of the customers that we added, these are some of the people that we added to the team. And then we have one or two focus topics for the meeting. It depends on how long the meeting was, because it was the start of the year and we had more time. We did a deep dive on our product roadmap for 2025. And one of my learnings from that is I probably should have shared a little information ahead of time so that the conversation could have been even more productive. It was a great conversation, but it's a lot to take in. And of course, I'm there like, you know, heaving and trying to be heard. During our kickoff a few days earlier, I actually had to use a microphone, which you guys know me. My voice carries, and I don't like using a microphone, but I get up there and I'm like, hi, I'm gonna use a microphone this time

because you're not gonna hear me otherwise. So I did a deep dive on the product roadmap, and then I had a few members of our product team join for about an hour, and they did a discovery workshop on a major new feature that we're developing in the first quarter of this year. So that's sort of how I try to do it. So I start off all of these meetings by saying this is an extremely selfish

thing for us, like we're getting the value out of this and I really appreciate your time, I appreciate your contributions, and I hope that I end up being wrong and you actually also get value out of it too. But just in case you don't, thank you in advance. And they've all been thrilled to do it, and then they do come back and say look, it's the connections that we get that are very valuable, but also, in the course of talking about this feature, for example, they were all able to give input, but they also said, wow, listening to this person and that person I Didn't realize that we could approach the problem this way. 

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Tyler Finn 

Mm-hmm

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Kevin Cohn 

And so I think they're getting they're getting quite a bit out of it as well

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Tyler Finn 

I think more people in the legal community legal ops and GC's in-house lawyers Want to or interested in product development than we might expect. I think that it is Easy to say I don't know. They're just interested in the outcomes. But I actually think that a lot of them almost wish they had a way to kind of like dig deeper or scratch that itch or get themselves more involved because they just don't always know how to do so. Right. You've got to give them the outlet or design the outlet for them. 

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Matthew Wheatley

Yeah, because they're smart people who are curious about a lot of different things. You just happen to decide to go to law school like

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Tyler Finn 

Right.

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Matthew Wheatley

Too many smart people decide to go to law school and their talents are kind of wasted, I think.

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Kevin Cohn 

But I mean, like, present company excluded.

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Matthew Wheatley

I'm probably a pretty good example, given that I went to law school and I'm no longer practicing. But yeah, I think that lawyers are really, really smart in a lot of different ways, and legal operations professionals, and they have a lot to add when it comes to things like product design.

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Tyler Finn 

Okay, switching gears. You mentioned conferences, Matt. Events you're excited for this year, events that you are dreading, that you know you're going to have to attend.

Maybe for Kevin, that's based on the length of the flight, 16-plus hour flights.

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Matthew Wheatley

Yeah, yes, looking forward to a lot of events. I don't travel as much as Kevin, but I'm on the road at least once a month. I'm looking forward to any events that can bring together. I care a lot about legal operations professionals and I care a lot about in-house lawyers. Anything that brings those two groups together is something I'm particularly excited about. I think the conference has done a good job with that in particular is running Legal Like a Business.

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Tyler Finn 

I haven't been to that one before. It's good 

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Matthew Wheatley

It's good, yeah. It's big, but not too big.

They are trying to bring in in-house counsel, to bring in just different voices. So I'm looking forward to that one, but I'm looking forward to smaller events, customer on-site visits. You know, it's really good to go to 2,000, 3,000 person conferences, but I like the smaller events, the more that I go to conferences.

What about you, Kevin?

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Kevin Cohn 

I think there are too many because people don't have budget to go to anywhere near as many. Like, the market demands cannot support Cloc, ACC, Running Legal Like a Business, Legal Operators, Consero, and, and, and, just too many. ACC. So, yeah, so, you know, I think the L-Suite and Link coming together, for example, good thing for a number of reasons, one of them being that there's a little consolidation, in my mind, right? But yeah, people end up having to choose between do I go to cloc, because that's where I know I'll see the most people and also have a good time probably, but maybe I won't learn quite as much, versus do I go to something that's more focused, whether it's a legalops.com regional event or you know something else like SpotDraft's upcoming summit, and the learning might be deeper,

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Tyler Finn 

yup

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Kevin Cohn 

but the network building might not be as big. But there's also a bit of a false choice there because I don't know a lot of people who go to CLOC who aren't very early in their career and come out and be like, I met a lot of new people who are actually going to really help me. It's usually like, there were a lot of people, I had a good time, there was a party. So I think that that's part of the reason that CLOC is maybe, it doesn't have quite the hold that it used to.

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Tyler Finn 

I feel like CLOC for a lot of people, and I've only been to two or three CLOC myself, but I had this experience from my prior life working in privacy, which is the first time you go to this IAPP conference, it's fantastic, and you're learning, and you're meeting all these people, and you get to meet all the other customers and clients of your law firm that you've never met before. And then by the fifth one, it's like, okay, well, there's like another session over there and that's great. And like, I'm sure it's an interesting conversation on stage, but the real conversation is happening outside the Starbucks across the street.

Where all the people who've been around for many years are talking and sharing and learning from each other as opposed to learning from the keynotes or the panelsor what have you.

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Matthew Wheatley

It's back to the smaller groups, customer advisory boards, groups like Tech GC that are a little more tight knit. I think there's a lot of value in that. I mean, everybody goes to Cloc. So you're getting that same crossover. But I think a lot of the more senior people are going and probably not going to many of the sessions. They're just there to hang out with each other. And I don't even know how much business is being talked about a lot of the time. It's just to see people that you like and that you've gotten to know over the years.

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Tyler Finn 

You mentioned the link acquisition. I'm very excited about that. And I will say I'm biased because I worked with Karen and Greg on TechGC before they rebranded it as the L-Suite. And so I have a little bit of a stake in that.

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I will say that, but I'm very excited about it because I want to see legal ops in conversation with GCs and in-house counsel more. I think that sometimes the two groups talk past each other or they don't quite know how to talk to each other and that's natural, right? I think that the training that lawyers get is very different than the way that lots of legal ops professionals careers evolve, but I'm looking forward to there being an established place where one of the primary goals is facilitating that sort of conversation.

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Matthew Wheatley

For sure. I mean, I think that it's good for that. It's good for job opportunities, growth opportunities. I mean, there's so I've looked at the Fortune 1000 to see how many of them have legal operations functions, it's about half, a little less than half actually. I bet if you looked at unicorn tech companies, high growth startups, even fewer of them actually have a dedicated legal operations titled person. And I think there's probably a lot of opportunity for like a small legal department that's got a lot of chaos to hire a legal ops person. So I think it's a good growth space too, for it to unlock new job opportunities in a kind of a tough market for legal ops

professionals.

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Kevin Cohn 

Yeah, I mean, I think so. Any time that you have opposites, right, they can attract, but also they can very easily misunderstand one another and repel. And one of the dynamics that I think the legal ops labor market is still in the process of working through is what is legal ops really? What is the terminal state going to be?

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Is it going to be this extremely strategic right hand to the CLO, GC at one extreme? Is it going to be the e-billing or CLM admin at the other extreme? Or is it going to be a mix, or is there going to be a diversity? Right? So not, it's doing a little of this and it's doing a little of that, but some people are here, some people are here, some people are somewhere else. And by having what has been the case up until, you know, LegalOps.com really started to take off about two years ago, and until the L-Suite acquired Link, is that you had them on parallel tracks. Like, never the two shall meet. Even ACC, which has historically been about, you know, the law practicing members of the team, created this other event, ACC Legal Ops Con, and I don't think that it was intentional to sort of like, keep them separate, but that's what ends up happening a lot of the time. And so that's not helping the industry as a whole to get to a point of resolution around how do these personas better communicate, better strategize, better execute, and ultimately deliver better results. So I think it's a great thing that L Suite acquired. Link, I think what Connie and Jeff are doing at legaloffs.com is also great. We need more of that.

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Matthew Wheatley

What do you think LegalOps is right now? So talking about what the terminus is, there's a lot of debate, like is it the things that you mentioned, but. 

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Tyler Finn 

Let me put out a finer point on that question.

I think that there's some honest intellectual disagreement about this, and then I think there's some people who have like very very strong deeply held opinions about this which they've been doing this a lot longer than I have so that's okay but is legal ops supposed to be a right hand to a GC or a CLO and be deeply integrated into the legal function is one sort of view of a paragon of legal ops I think another view is we should be a big part of operations for the business

broadly and our path should run potentially through rev ops or sales ops or general sort of operations function in the business. And the work that we do is less intrinsically tied to the way that lawyers think or the way that lawyers work together, or the way that a legal team runs, as opposed to the efficiencies and the process improvements that we drive.

I think there's big disagreement about where the legal ops space should be running. Do you agree with my framing, I guess, first of all? 

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Kevin Cohn 

Yeah, so I think what I'm hearing you say is there are kind of two dimensions on which to think about this. One dimension is, and this is an oversimplification, but strategic and tactical. And the other dimension is legal specific or more sort of general business operations, you know, cost functional. And I think that it's helpful to think about where you are and where you might want to

be on those two dimensions. But I think it would be a mistake to conclude that legal ops will end up being a single point on that chart. So thinking about revenue operations, which has existed for quite a bit longer than legal ops, is in the Radford guide. There are pay bans. There are many more people in the world doing rev ops jobs than legal ops jobs because it got started so much earlier, you can find people just as passionate as the people that we know who are very passionate about legal ops saying this is extremely strategic, it reports directly to the chief revenue officer, it's not a Salesforce administrator role, but you can also find people who are thrilled to have just gotten their first Salesforce administrator role, right?

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Tyler Finn 

Totally

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Kevin Cohn 

And that's okay. And similarly, if you grabbed, you know, 10 heads of revenue at, let's just say, at tech companies, because that's where you tend to find rev ops more often than not, you would probably get five of them saying, sales ops is different than marketing ops, is different than CS ops, and you would get the other five saying, it's all revenue, why are you trying to draw these artificial distinctions? And so, what I try to say to people when I have this conversation about legal ops is We don't have to choose

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Tyler Finn 

Right

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Kevin Cohn 

We don't have to aim it in one direction But we do need to get better at defining What we mean whenever we use the term legal ops in any particular context, right? So there isn't one definition for it in this circumstance and in that circumstance,

you know, and so on.

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Matthew Wheatley

So, so you do think that it's important to define it in a way, because what I, what I heard and I agree with you is even RevOps has been around for a long time. It's different depending on the organization and it is to that organization what it needs to be for that organization. And I, you know, we're human, so we're going to like debate these things and fight about them, but does it actually matter? Does it need to be defined or is it okay that legal ops at this company is going to be what it needs to be for that legal department because of how they work or and it's going to be different at another organization and the right talent for that particular role is going to end up in that position? 

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Kevin Cohn 

I think it needs to be better defined than it is now for two primary reasons. The first is, legal ops is not yet the norm, right? If you go to cloc, it feels like it's the norm, but you have to remember that you're at the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium annual meeting, right? So you're surrounded by it. But my favorite legal ops person to meet is the person who works in a legal ops role somewhere in the middle of the country, like outside of the major cities, outside of the major legal ops hotspots, at a company that I've never heard of before that's doing five and a half billion dollars a year in revenue, right?

Like, I want to understand what that person thinks legal ops is, what their GC thinks legal ops is, because that is ultimately the future, is like what mainstream business thinks of it as being. And not having it better defines makes it difficult to get to that point, I think. 

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Matthew Wheatley

Yeah. that’s fair

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Kevin Cohn 

The other way in which it impacts negatively is compensation.

Because if the title, legal operations manager, can mean anything and everything, if it could mean anything from your entire job is to administer, you know, bright flag or spot draft or something like that, all the way to you are the strategic right hand to the CLO and you're planning the OKRs for the entire department and you're managing the budget for the entire department and you're deciding what the promotion paths are for the senior attorneys, like that person is not, those two people are not gonna be paid the same, but right now that is the main way that their compensation is assessed and that's broken. 

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Tyler Finn

I think to expand on that too, I like the idea that we don't have to pick whether or not this leads people in a more general ops direction or it leads them in a legal specific and right hand of the CLO direction. I think that people should feel free to have either of those career paths open to them too, right? So saying there is something unique maybe about legal ops that means that there should be an operations function within a legal department where the people who staff it want to work with lawyers as opposed to with people generally across the business and that's maybe required or important for success does not preclude people on that team or in that function from saying, but ultimately, I would love to be the CEO of a business or ultimately my career should lead in an operations direction. I'm testing that hypothesis with you, the two of you.

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Matthew Wheatley

I agree. I don't, I don't know enough about what it's, what general operations hiring processes would look like is, is a director or VP of legal ops going to be considered for a COO position at a fortune 1000 company? I don't I don't know the answer to that but I think that legal is whether it is or isn't lawyers think that it is extremely unique and I assume it is I mean just thinking about relationships with law firms and the types of technology that lawyers are willing to use and the fact that there is a legal specific billing invoice software.

Very good, bright flag. I think that there's going to always be at some organizations a distinct legal operations function because that's what legal wants. That's what some legal departments want.

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Kevin Cohn 

So one of our, I'm smiling because one of our customers, this is a really, really large technology company. It's not a unicorn upstart it's like they've got ads all over every airport kind of company and About eight months ago The CEO of the company made a decision to consolidate every ops team, Sales ops teams, ops legal ops under a single Organizational umbrella rolling up to the global chief operating officer. I think hmm and so I remember The head of legal ops of this company, you know, and I'm good friends with them said well, this is what's happening I don't really understand why it's being done. It's happening And I thought okay. Well, you know, we're hearing about things like this. Let's see how it goes. I caught up with them just a few weeks ago and I said, so what's changed? He said, nothing. I have a different manager, but everything I do is legal. I put together my OKRs for the quarter, and I sort of brought them to my new manager,

and the manager says, well, that's good, but you have to align them with the broader OPS goals for the organization and it's like but I'm still only supporting the legal team yeah so like in my title is still legal operations yeah 

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Tyler Finn 

so this reminds me a little bit and we're not going to talk about this because we don't have enough time this reminds me a little bit of the conversation that I think that all of us contributed to six months ago about should the GC report to the CEO or the CFO or right I mean that's sort of the same, yeah a little bit of the same thing right 

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Matthew Wheatley

it's the equivalent right yes which is to say maybe or maybe not or maybe right would legal ops people want to be like as a the legal ops profession would they want to be absorbed into operations more generally? Is that an attractive thing? Because I see it framed like it's kind of the next,

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Kevin Cohn 

again, like when you say legal ops people, the typical legal, there are about 10,000 legal operations professionals, and the way I'm defining that is they have legal operations or legal transformation or legal technology in their title, and they are working in-house, right? About 10,000 in the world. The overwhelming majority of them started their careers as paralegals or legal administrators, all right? And there's nothing wrong with that at all, and the sooner that we all recognize that that is the future legal operations workforce, the more successful we'll all be because we'll be building tools for them, educational content to make them successful, etc. But those people, they came, not meant to be pejorative, they chose to be paralegals, they chose to be legal admins, they enjoy legal. So that doesn't mean that they don't want to go and do other things, and more power to them if they do, but also more power to them if they don't. 

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Matthew Wheatley

Yeah

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Tyler Finn

Yeah

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Kevin Cohn 

There's nothing wrong with that. I think that that's, again, going back to definitions, if you just say, well, anything could be legal operations, then you get a lot of this slop,

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Matthew Wheatley

Yeah I think. There is kind of a silent, but probably big group of people in legal operations at like varying levels who actually don't care about any of these things either. Who are just like,

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Tyler Finn 

How can you make my job easier?

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Matthew Wheatley

Yeah, I make a good living. You know, I like the people I work with. Sure, some of my work happens to be doing things that the lawyers don't want to do, but I'm good with it. And they're not like grappling with these kinds of questions that the three of us live with on a day-to-day basis because this is like our livelihoods.

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Kevin Cohn 

Yeah. And as it relates to comp, I think you're right that a lot of people, in fact, I know you're right, that most people are actually very happy with their job, with what they're earning. It allows them to support their families and that's the most important thing. We just launched the 2025 Legal Ops Compensation Survey a week and a half ago, and so we're in the middle of the drive to get people to participate. And I understand that that's a very, like we're in a very privileged position to be giving people the opportunity to voluntarily share the sensitive information, so we take it very seriously. And I do some like personal outreach to get those early participants going, and they're the ones who tend to promote it on social media and drives a lot of responses. And so I texted someone. I've known this person for a long time. They've been working in legal operations for a very long time. And I said, Have you participated yet? And they said, No. At my new job, my comp sucks, so I wasn't going to. And I'm like, well, I'm not sure what problem we're solving here. And I'm sure when you look at your paycheck, you realize that this is what the market has determined the function is worth right now. That's the purpose of the survey. So there is a lot of noise on LinkedIn, and I contribute to some of it unintentionally.

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Matthew Wheatley

Your stuff’s good.

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Kevin Cohn 

But, thanks.

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Tyler Finn 

I like your pay transparency. People don't know about this.

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Matthew Wheatley

Pay transparency, yeah.

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Kevin Cohn 

Yeah, it's, I remember a moment much earlier in my career, way before I was at Bright Flag and in legal. I was sitting at a bar in Tokyo. I was on business, and someone who worked for me in London calls me and says, Kevin, disaster, I just found out that this wasn't a bright flag again, all of our customer success managers are talking to one another about how much we're paying them. What should I do? And I said, what are you, I didn't know where to start. I was like, what should you do? Nothing. There's nothing to do. Why are you surprised? Why are you just discovering that people talk about how much they're paid? I think pay transparency is a great thing for a variety of reasons, including that it helps to eliminate or at least reduce bias, but also, and I mean this with all due respect, just so it cuts down the amount of time that is wasted wondering, right? So you know, this is how much that role is paying.

This is how much that person is being paid. And now you can get the head trash out and go on with improving in the ways that you want to improve so that you can grow your earnings. So that's a big part of the reason that I'm so passionate about doing this survey every year is to

empower people to be compensated in a fair way, but also to empower them to leave the head trash behind. Like the number is what the number is. If you want to change it, go and do things to change it, but please don't say, I don't know. Like, leave that behind. 

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Tyler Finn 

Was there anything surprising in last year's data? And do you have any predictions for this year's? 

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Kevin Cohn 

So the most surprising thing in last year's data was that the gender pay graph grew. Which was really disappointing.

So we had a year in which it was closing. 

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Tyler Finn 

Mm-hmm 

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Kevin Cohn 

And closing in a really Compelling way I would say especially in scene with senior positions It had closed quite a bit and then last year. It's like it rubber bands it back and it got worse So that was the most surprising thing What I'm seeing in the in the early data so far and you know if you if you haven't participated yet I think by the time this airs the survey is still going to be open. So you can go to brightflag.com slash the abstract and it will redirect you to the survey.

‍

Tyler Finn 

It will be open. I know when this is going to be released.It will be open. Yeah.

‍

Kevin Cohn 

Yeah. So brightflag.com slash the abstract and you can participate in the survey. What I'm seeing through the, and we've already got hundreds of responses, is the leveling, it's confirming that on average the leveling has come down. Right, so when we first started to do this, it was the high point of 2021, 2022, the money was flowing, everyone was hiring, the senior VP of legal operations, and it's just a statement of fact that those VP roles have become director roles, a lot of the director roles have become manager roles, and some of the manager roles have been eliminated. And so still seeing that pattern in the early response this year.

‍

Matthew Wheatley

You already have that URL set up? Yeah, the abstract?

‍

Kevin Cohn 

I will by the time.

‍

Matthew Wheatley

Jeff Soriano, man.

‍

Tyler Finn 

He's got a week and a half, two weeks.

‍

Matthew Wheatley

Their marketing guy.

‍

Kevin Cohn 

Hey, where did you get that haircut?

‍

Matthew Wheatley

Down in Soho. 

‍

Kevin Cohn 

Jeff didn't cut your hair. 

‍

Matthew Wheatley

Had to get a fresh fade. 

‍

Tyler Finn 

We do a comp survey and legal office people were able to contribute, but it was more focused on in-house counsel. And I'm curious what you saw. You reminded me of our sort of analysis of the gender pay gap in that. And one of the things that I thought was interesting there, I don't have a good answer for why this is the case, corporate counsel, AGC level, pretty distinct gender pay gap. Even at the GC level, a little bit less so. Chief legal officer, no, actually. And now, we did look and we wanted to make sure

there's actually a statistically significant sample size for each of these, right? I wasn't the one who did that, but I was assured by the people who did that it wasn't like five CLOs responded, right? There probably is a, I don't know, what CLO means is a little bit different than what corporate counsel means. Corporate counsel is probably more consistent, but I thought that was interesting that sort of like at the, would be the equivalent to the manager and director level

that you're talking about, pretty significant gap, but at the C-suite level, not quite so much.

‍

Matthew Wheatley

Yeah, I don't have any theories on why that could be. I wonder, I mean, at public companies, those salaries are presumably reported at a C. I mean, hopefully that's not enough to enforce people paying the same genders equally, but maybe there's something there. I don't know.

‍

Tyler Finn 

I mean, you also figure, I guess, someone is total conjecture, someone who's able to negotiate for a chief legal officer title probably has a lot more negotiating power, generally speaking. But these things are kind of pernicious. So 

‍

Matthew Wheatley

there's usually – maybe there's usually a search firm involved at the CLO level. So there's a third party there to advise on any good retained search firm is going to have a lot of data about what a position is worth. Yeah, I don't know. I maybe just I mean, to your point about the importance of this data, it's it, it ultimately contributes to fairness and ideally higher salaries. I bet there's findings on this. And so if you're working with a good search firm, they're going to have some some good comp data to maybe help with that.

‍

Kevin Cohn 

Yeah, I'm just thinking about taking a step out from legal but thinking about comp more generally. So in the venture-backed software company space,

‍

Matthew Wheatley

He’s recovering from the 

‍

Kevin Cohn 

Wait, wait, I didn’t say I am recovering

‍

Kevin Cohn 

So in the venture-backed software company space, there are tons of comp benchmarks. If you ever look at the interquartile range, so how much variability is there between the 25th percentile and the 75th percentile? You could drive a semi through it. There isn't as much consistency and compensation in sales and go-to-market roles or in CFO roles or in CTO roles as you would think. Generally, I would say in the office, in the knowledge worker labor market, we're at a point in time where the compensation is all over the place. Probably not to the extreme that it is in many legal operations roles, but especially in the US, I would say we are not paragons of pay consistency. 

‍

Matthew Wheatley

Two paragons in one podcast. Wow.

‍

Matthew Wheatley

Are you taking notes over that

‍

Matthew Wheatley

I'm listening intently. Hey, can I take us back to something a little controversial? I know we're...

‍

Tyler Finn 

Please.

‍

Matthew Wheatley

I wanted to ask about this JD and legal ops thing. Does anybody want to... We've got room for nuance in this discussion. Any thoughts?

‍

Tyler Finn

I mean, well, I don't have a law degree, although I think I don't correct people all the time when they assume that I do. And I spent a number of years reporting to GCs, working for GCs, doing privacy work, compliance work, work around data. Look, I think that you can find very talented people who can do a lot of the same work that lawyers can do within a business, who may be able to flex themselves to do things that people with many years of law school plus being an associate at a firm for a while may not be comfortable doing. But I think that different organizations need to decide what do they want to hire for, for what position. What sort of culture are they trying to build? What sort of skill set do they want? What sort of risk appetite do they want? Do they want to hire someone who's gonna really lean into technology and opportunity? Or do they want someone who's gonna come in and establish like super clear processes that no one ought to violate? violate. So it does, it frustrates me a little bit when I see companies who say we're hiring for this legal ops position or this privacy program manager position and we want a law degree and we think that that's a prerequisite. But I also think maybe the organization's signaling something about what they value and maybe someone who has a better bedside manner with the business isn't the right fit for that company or for that role or for the person who's running the team.

‍

Matthew Wheatley

Hit us, Kevin.

‍

Tyler Finn 

Disagree.

‍

Kevin Cohn 

Lean. No, no, no, no, no. I don't disagree. First of all, I think that this entire debate is overdone. About 9% of legal ops postings require a JD. This is not a broad-based issue, it's just a very emotional issue, not only for people who don't have a JD, but mostly for people who don't have a JD, of which I am one. I don't have one. So first of all, less than 10%, right? Second of all, I think people immediately jump for that 9% to ascribe motive. They think less of the people who don't have the JD and that's the problem. I think what's actually going on most of the time is laziness and writing the job description. It's not that someone sat down and said, I think that anyone who is going to be in a legal ops position needs to have a JD and anyone who doesn't have a JD is lesser. I think most of the people writing the job descriptions are lazy or sloppy. And I'll give you an example. This is my honest opinion, and I'll give you an example. So we have Google Alerts set up for Bright Flag. We want to know when stuff shows up on the internet. And got this notification, this is over a year ago. One of the largest insurers in the country has posted a job description for a director of legal operations. And I'm thinking, why did Bright Flag show up in this job description I'm reading through it? And it says, you know, preferred if the candidate has experience using Bright Flag. And I was expecting it to say, preferred if the candidate has experience using Bright Flag or this other system or this other system. But no, it just said Bright Flag. And they're not a customer.

‍

Tyler Finn 

Interesting. 

‍

Kevin Cohn 

And they're not going to be a customer any time soon. 

‍

Matthew Wheatley

And dollar signs are appearing in Kevin's mind. 

‍

Kevin Cohn 

And so I'm thinking to myself, like, what am I missing here? Because I could send it to the sales team and say, hey, maybe they're working with a partner that's advising them to switch to Bright Flag, or maybe they just hired someone who was previously a customer. But I'm thinking, but it seems weird. It seems very unusual. And I sent it to someone else on the team, and this person was like, Sherlock Holmes. And five minutes later, they write back and say, the entire job description was a copy-and-paste job from our other customer over here, who's really small. So it's like this large insurer with a 2,000 person legal department, copied and pasted from start to bottom the job posting that this actual customer had for a 20 person legal team, right? If that happens for one of the largest insurers in the country, I guarantee you there's a lot of sloppiness for the other 99.9% of postings. So I just think that the temperature has to be lowered here. There are just precious few people who are not getting a job they want because they don't have a JD. That's just not the primary thing. Now, I'll tell you one of the primary things is if you got a legal ops job in 2021 or 2022 when not just in legal but everywhere salaries were seriously inflated and now the labor market has adjusted and you're still anchored up here, you're in trouble. But the trouble is between the ears and behind the eyes. You got to catch back up to where the labor market is. And I think that that time, I have come to look back on that time where there was this, it appeared to be permanent explosion in legal ops, but I think we now know that it was a flash in the pan. That was on balance, not a positive for the industry, I think. 

‍

Tyler Finn 

Let's talk about hiring. Do you have a reaction to that?

‍

Matthew Wheatley

No, I think that was fantastic.

‍

Kevin Cohn 

You're just glad that I said it instead of you.

‍

Matthew Wheatley

Yeah, I didn't want to answer the question. I just wanted you all to talk about it.

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah, let's talk about hiring a little bit. What are you seeing in the market beyond maybe a misalignment between the expectations that people have and the opportunities that may be out there? Do we think that the market is picking up at all? I mean, so I have a stronger perspective, I would say, on the in-house counsel market than I do on the legal ops market. I think that there are some signs of life that weren't there a year ago that are there now. I also think that the more senior that you get, the longer that you are unfortunately are going to be on the bench. You write about this a bit, Matt, on LinkedIn. I think that if you're looking for a GC or CLO role you're probably gonna be looking for six months at least if not 12 or 18. Like you need to be thinking not just about how am I networking but maybe you should pick up a couple of clients on the side not only for the income but that way you have really interesting relevant new things to talk about in interviews so that way you're still sort of intellectually sharp, right? 

‍

Matthew Wheatley

Yeah.

Yeah.

‍

Tyler Finn 

Curious what both of you are seeing.

‍

Kevin Cohn 

Yeah, how did you describe it? Sluggish, but maybe starting to show signs. 

‍

Tyler Finn 

Yeah. 

‍

Kevin Cohn 

I think I would say the same thing, and I completely agree with your characterization of as you become more senior, it's gonna take longer. And again, like we'll go back to the math to explain that. In any given company, there is a maximum of one GC role, a maximum of one CLO role. And it's the same thing in legal ops. There's a maximum of one head of legal operations, whether it's a manager, director, VP, whatever. There's one. whether you're in legal or in sales or in finance or whatever, you're doing a job and you've got however many co-workers, counterparts, who are doing precisely the same job. Like if you're a sales rep and you're at Oracle, you're one of whatever, 5,000. If you're a regional VP of sales at Oracle, you're one of a few hundred. If you want to be the president of worldwide sales, it's only one of those positions at Oracle. That's the same thing with legal, whether it's on the council side or on the ops side. 

‍

Matthew Wheatley

I think people get used to their job searches being quick, earlier in their career, and the more experience you get, and especially I work with a lot of people who are in between jobs, and if you're in between jobs right now in this market and you're senior, it's a six-plus-month search. The Wall Street Journal did a study recently, it was like earlier this month, and it was if you are a white-collar worker, and they explicitly referenced legal, and you are not currently working, on average it's six months. And to your point, like if you've been a CLO in particular at a Fortune

1000 or a publicly traded company and you're looking for a new job, there's like maybe one job on the market at a time that you could be a good fit for that a hundred other qualified people are looking at. And so I feel for people who are either on the market because they don't have another opportunity or because their search has been taking too long because it is like soul sucking for people to just keep throwing their resume into what feels like a black hole sometimes. But you just gotta keep swinging the bat. You gotta lean on your network. Talk to a lot of people. Talk to me, talk to Kevin at Bright Flag, your law firm partner, Tyler, who talks to everybody on the abstract. You just gotta keep having conversations with people and it inevitably works out.

‍

Kevin Cohn 

And I think your recommendation to be doing some things on the side, not just to keep sharp but to have more to talk about is a great one and you make some money doing it too. 

‍

Tyler Finn 

How do you counsel folks around that? Because I know you've got some perspectives on standing up your own fractional practice and what that means. How would you counsel someone through that decision actually? I'm curious. Like should they hop on Priori and use Priori? Should they stand up a sort of like business of two or three clients on the side?

‍

Matthew Wheatley

Yeah.

‍

Tyler Finn 

Does it depend on whether or not they think

‍

Matthew Wheatley

It depends

‍

Tyler Finn 

they want to be doing that sort of work for a couple years as opposed to for a few months?

‍

Matthew Wheatley

It always depends. I mean if someone's ultimate goal is to be a W-2 employee of another company and they want to do that as soon as possible, maybe you pick up some fractional work just to keep yourself busy, keep your skills sharp, but you're not going to invest the amount of time that's required to really have a go at it. And there are people who are really, really having a go at it. It's a competitive market for fractional lawyers because there's been some amazing lawyers who have decided at all stages of their careers that this is what they want to do. They want to work 60, 70, 80 hours a week, they want to bill out at, you know, 250, $300 an hour, maybe higher, especially if they're sourcing their own work. Like, if you're getting your work directly from a client, as opposed to, look, Priori, other companies like us, we are great for helping you scale a practice, quickly connect with clients. But like, clients come to us with a particular market rate in mind. Like if you can go to your friend, who's the GC at a Fortune 500, they're gonna pay you a higher rate. And so it's not a market that can be competed in in a real way, unless you're really committed to it, but you can pick up some work as a secondee through a platform for sure. But it's like, totally depends on what your goals are. And I just want to hear about that from people before telling them they should do a particular thing.

‍

Tyler Finn 

All right. I'll take us to the last topic of conversation before fun closing questions. Let's talk about the legal tech landscape and what we're seeing.

Are you actually excited about AI right now? Are you worried about AI? I mean, everybody wants to ask, is it overhyped? Is it underhyped? I'm like, I'm less about that debate, more that like, are you excited about what you think AI can deliver? Are you excited about using AI? Or are you sort of like a little bit more concerned and worried about it, and I use it every day myself.

‍

Kevin Cohn 

So I’m and I’m very excited about it and I use it every day myself. Every hour, I would say. You can also be worried about it. 

‍

Tyler Finn

Sure.

‍

Kevin Cohn 

You know the number one profession in all 50 states? Either of you know?

‍

Matthew Wheatley

No. What is it? 

‍

Tyler Finn 

Truck driver?

‍

Kevin Cohn 

Driving for money. Number one profession in every state, right? Truck drivers, taxi drivers, Uber drivers, Lyft drivers, et cetera. Driving, you know, driving for your profession. So, you know, we've been promised self-driving cars for a while now, and we're not there yet, but it's definitely coming, right? That is one example far from legal, although I can't wait to see all the litigation. That's a joke. But, you know, that's one example where it's clearly coming to, AI is clearly coming to fundamentally disrupt the economy, the labor market, and like those are these fancy words that we use on a podcast to mean people's lives, right? And that is scary because, you know, at least in this country, and I would argue probably in any country, there is no idea of a plan, to say nothing of, an actual plan in motion to protect the citizens who are going to be negatively impacted by this kind of technology. So, I worry about it on that level, but that's a really far cry from, hey, at Bright Flag we use AI to help you better engage with law firms, right? No one is losing their job because of Bright Flag. 

‍

Tyler Finn 

Totally

‍

Kevin Cohn 

Parts of their job that they hate are being automated, they're getting better insights, they're having better relationships with their law firms. So I don't worry about it from a professional perspective. But yeah, I use it every hour, every hour.

‍

Tyler Finn 

Do you use AI?

‍

Matthew Wheatley

I do. Yeah. I don't use it to write my LinkedIn posts, for the record. I mean, I don't know.

‍

Kevin Cohn 

That's why you don't get any traction anymore. Seriously, what's going on with the algorithm?

‍

Matthew Wheatley

I mean, I don't think I can say anything like unique about AI. I assume our society will figure it out, maybe, like on a broader level. But for me, thinking about the legal industry and the space that I'm in, I'm excited about what it can mean for alternative legal service providers. You know, I think that if you look at something like document review, where like 15, 20 years ago, that was a really big profit center for big law firms, and now they don't do it at all. Like that's gone to the vendors. And I think that with the help of AI and just the evolution of the big law firm model generally, I think a lot of work is going to be shifted away from big firms to, I think AI is going to reduce the amount of work that some firms are, like an Amlaw 20 firm probably isn't going to be doing vendor contracts in three, four, five years. Like that is going to go to either, I don't know, a fractional lawyer who is powered by AI, who uses that technology to help with it. But I think it ultimately is good for alternative legal service provider space because I think it's gonna just shift work to a different format.

‍

Tyler Finn 

You have a prediction in your list of predictions. Kevin did a blog post, predictions for 2025. 

‍

Kevin Cohn

I blogged.

‍

Tyler Finn 

You blogged. And I think you wrote it.I don't think AI wrote that for you.

‍

Kevin Cohn

I wrote it, I wrote it, yeah

‍

Tyler Finn 

One of your predictions was more CLM consolidation. I think the other interesting, I mean, there's a couple interesting angles on that that I want to test with the two of you. One is, yeah, probably more CLM consolidation. Two is sort of who's doing that, who's raised enough to make that happen, who's raised too much that they're too expensive to get bought. I think that's a really interesting question. Although, the sort of competition antitrust constraints that might have been present the past four years seem to be Gone, so maybe you know a sales force Let's say or is going to be back in the market and thinking I don't need to worry about DOJ approval on this But the other angle here that I'm curious for two of your thoughts on especially with this explosion of companies that are small Raise some venture money have a sort of AI-focused product. A lot of these are great companies run by super smart people. There's also a lot of companies out there that are features as opposed to sort of like systems or platforms. To me, that screams the opportunity for consolidation, maybe not this year, but in the next few. 

‍

Kevin Cohn 

Yeah, so you're absolutely right that in order to be acquirable, you need to have a sale price in mind that is in line with your current market value, right? And a lot of companies, again, going back to 2021, 2022, colossal amounts of money, you know, 30, 40, 50, 100 times annual revenue when the median software as a service company in the public markets now is trading at a little over 6x revenue, right? So you're in a situation where if you want to exit, someone is, at least one person, probably a lot of people are going to take a bath, and there's no point in doing that. So people batten down the hatches, drastically cut costs. Sometimes you can cut your way to growth. Most of the time you can't. Most of the time, the only way to growth is through innovation, delivering fantastic results to customers, and out-executing the competition. So my view with the CLM market, but really you could apply this philosophy to any market, is it's the vendors that have raised enough money to be able to control their own destiny, but not too much that they have placed themselves in a category where they have to get to 100 or 200 million in annual revenue in order for the math to work, and they are disciplined

‍

Tyler Finn 

Yes. 

‍

Kevin Cohn 

And they are disciplined enough not to go too broad, right? Because at the end of the day, if you ask a bunch of buyers, do you want one vendor that provides a solution to everything or do you want, you know, the best of breed, right? And you cobble together your ideal platform, half are going to say one, half are going to say the platform, they're talking about established markets, where that platform exists and the way it got there was that vendor started by doing one thing really well, like Salesforce started by doing CRM really well. Then they added all these other things, commerce, analytics, Slack, et cetera, et cetera. But that came so long after Salesforce had already completely dominated the core market. And what I see in CLM, for example, is too many vendors say, soup to nuts, from intake to post-execution analytics and storage, we're the best at everything. And it's just not true with anybody. So the most successful CLM vendors are the ones that say, you have a really high transaction volume business, and the variability from one transaction to the next, from one contract to the next, is actually pretty tight. So it's all about intake and workflow and the playbook, and that's where we're fantastic. Those are the vendors that are, I think, having the most success in that category. And so you see DocuSign making acquisitions, Workday making acquisitions. We're going to see more of that. 

‍

Tyler Finn 

Agiloft getting bought.

‍

Kevin Cohn 

Agiloft, absolutely, by KKR. 

‍

Tyler Finn 

The only thing that I would, and actually I do think that one of the opportunities maybe for companies that have, I wouldn't say raised too much, but maybe raised too much, or are

finding themselves in a position where it's hard to get acquired, I mean private equity is an option there potentially, right? I'm not a finance person, but I mean, that seems like a reasonable outlet. So you may see more of that is what I'm saying. You may not see one CLM buying up three other CLMs. Instead, you may see a private equity firm coming in or a consortium of investors coming in and buying up. 

‍

Kevin Cohn 

But for sure, but here's the thing. The P.E. playbook is, you know, if you're acquired by private equity for, let's say, $100, the PE is not writing a check for $100. That's not how it works. 

‍

Tyler Finn 

Sure.

‍

Kevin Cohn 

The PE writes a check for $30, $40, and then a bank writes the check for the rest. And then the company is levered. 

‍

Tyler Finn 

Totally.

‍

Kevin Cohn 

And so the cash flow has to pay down the principal and the interest. Interest rates are still really high. So if you don't have an efficient business, it doesn't matter that there's a lot of dry powder with PEs right now. You've got to get to a point where you have enough free cash flow to cover the debt service, and that's where you start to go against investing in innovation, investing in customer success. So I think we're going to see a lot of activity from private equity this year across all of legal tech. I just think that it's going to be more the winners winning out as opposed to someone sort of vulturing up the less

successful businesses. 

‍

Tyler Finn 

That's interesting. 

‍

Matthew Wheatley

To me, on the AI consolidation, we go to these conferences and just the conference floors are so crowded now with companies that I've not heard of before. I think that a lot of them don't have product market fit yet, so it's going to be hard for them to be acquired at this point. And I mean, maybe that's something that someone would take a flyer on potentially, but the

ones that I talk to just don't seem like they know exactly who they should be selling to yet.

‍

Tyler Finn 

Yeah, you don't hear about as many acqui-hires as you used to. That's for sure, right? You're not just paying a lot of money to bring talent into the business, even if it's super sophisticated technical talent. I think a lot of businesses are going to have that debate on some of this, build versus buy, versus find the talent outside and bring it in.

Because of what you're saying and the market conditions, I think a lot of companies are going to land on we need to find the resourcing internally to innovate ourselves as opposed to spending you know $25 million for seven software engineers.

‍

Matthew Wheatley

Yeah.

‍

Tyler Finn

All right. Did we do this pretty well, the substantive part?

‍

Kevin Cohn

The question is.

‍

Matthew Wheatley

Let's ask Kevin about his pet peeves.

‍

Kevin Cohn 

You know, I thought of one. Not using the Oxford comma. 

‍

Tyler Finn 

That's a good one.

‍

Kevin Cohn 

Drives me crazy. 

‍

Tyler Finn 

And it's confusing too. There is a reason for the Oxford comma and it's not being pretentious.

Matthew Wheatley

I think we're in the minority here though.

‍

Kevin Cohn 

I agree with you. Are we in the minority?

‍

Matthew Wheatley

I think we might.

‍

Kevin Cohn 

We might be in the minority in that we generally have good punctuation and commands of the English language, but.

‍

Tyler Finn 

We write our own blog posts.

‍

Kevin Cohn 

We write our own blog posts, yeah.

‍

Tyler Finn 

All right, closing questions. Pet peeve is one of them. All right, Kevin jumped the gun on that, or you set him up. So now you gotta do that one.

‍

Matthew Wheatley

Pet peeve, not any time that if you're in a sales oriented profession, not thinking about something that's gonna make the client's life easier, whether it's putting availability in their time zone. By the way, this is nothing that any, no one on my team would ever do anything like this, but not putting something in the client's time zone, not reattaching a document if you're following up on something when you're, if you're referencing a particular thing. So for me, it's, if you're in a customer service oriented profession, whether it's legal tech or whatever, always thinking about the client and trying to make it easy for them to work with you. 

‍

Tyler Finn 

Favorite part of your job? 

‍

Kevin Cohn 

So I think I have to say getting to be in front of our great team and our great customers customers so frequently. So being on the road constantly, it's exhausting. And I'm not old, but I'm obviously older than I used to be. That's the way it works. And I have started to feel the age a little bit more, but it's still the case that 99% of the time when I'm able to be... I'm a people person. I'm an extrovert, I go to the office every single day that I'm in the city, every single day, Monday, Friday, doesn't matter, I'm in the office. I had to be working from home earlier this week because I was sick and I hated it. So that's probably the best part of my job is being able to get in person with so many great people. 

Matthew Wheatley

So I am, I'm a recruiter at heart. I, that's what I really, I like connecting people with new jobs. You know, that's, that's for me, the best part of what I do. Whether it's connecting them with a new W2 job, the new fractional engagement. Yeah, I mean, I'm, when I first interviewed at my old company, they said, they asked me like, why would you want to do this? And I was like, I think it'd be kind of cool to help people find a new job, because it's so important to people, obviously. And I remember after the fact, they extended me an offer, but they were like, that's kind of a cliched answer. Yeah. And I was like skeptical of my own feelings at the time, but that is over being in this space for almost 10 years, that's still my favorite part of it is working with the talent. I love our clients, I love working with legal departments, but to me it's about helping someone find a job. That's motivating to me.

‍

Kevin Cohn 

It's so odd that they would have sort of like poo-pooed that answer. Isn't that exactly what they should want to hear from someone applying for a recruiting job? For the record, they definitely want that to be part of it. But I think that it's a, I don't know, if you have, a lot of people have, are skeptical of recruiters.

‍

Kevin Cohn

I'm skeptical of you. Does that count?

‍

Matthew Wheatley

It does. It does. And because I think that people think that they're only in it for themselves. And of course there's like the commercial value of the thing. But like, I don't know. For me, that's part of it, is being able to work with people who are looking for new jobs. 

‍

Kevin Cohn 

Hey, can we can we turn the tables on them here? 

‍

Matthew Wheatley

Yeah. Let's do that 

‍

Kevin Cohn 

Hi, I'm tyler fem And this is my classic closing question tyler book recommendation 

‍

Tyler Finn 

actually Uh, I have two and they are topical, uh A year ago. I read a book called Fire Weather about the huge fires that consumed the Canadian oil sands and the town there. Amazingly everyone escaped the town. The whole town was burned to the ground. Fire tornadoes, like a fire storm like no one had ever seen anywhere before and then the fire burned for like many, many weeks through the boreal forest and was seen from space. And I say that because you read that about what happened there, and then you look at some of the weather that's happening around the world, and I look specifically at like the recent fires in LA. If I'd been in LA where I used to live in my apartment, the mandatory evacuation zone was across the street. So I would have left 500 feet away. You pack up your stuff and you go. 

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Kevin Cohn

You don't wait for the notification.

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Tyler Finn

Correct. That's an amazing book. It's very well written. It's in three parts. I've been recommending it to people. I say read the first two parts. The first two parts are the narrative about the fire. The third part is a bunch of data on climate change. It's interesting, but it's not really the crux of what makes that book so compelling. And then the second book that I read this past weekend because I've been wanting to read it and it seemed very apt is called California Burning and it was written probably almost 10 years ago and it's basically about PG&E and the history of PG&E and what to do about the fact that we have this now very changed climate and we have lots of utilities and I'm sure there are other contexts for this right like important infrastructure that's going to be implicated in huge disasters and California has some unique laws that puts companies or utilities like PG&E at risk of insolvency. Other states don't have the same laws but those two books I would say kind of bookend both what climate change might portend and make something like what happened in LA a little bit less surprising, and then raises the question of what are you supposed to do afterwards, because clearly saying we can't have electricity or, right, you're not going to stop the winds, you're not going to stop the drought, at least for a long time. 

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Matthew Wheatley

A little light reading. 

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Kevin Cohn 

That was a sunny answer. I should have asked him about his biggest pet peeve.

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Matthew Wheatley

What's your favorite Harry Potter book? And why is it the first one? 

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Tyler Finn 

That'll teach you to turn the question back on me. 

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Kevin Cohn 

I know, I consider myself taught. 

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Tyler Finn

You wanted to offer a movie recommendation instead of a book recommendation to the audience. 

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Kevin Cohn 

Did I? It's not so much that I wanted to offer a movie recommendation as that I did not have a book recommendation. Movie recommendation. 

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Tyler Finn 

Or a podcast.

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Kevin Cohn 

Movie recommendation. So, okay. I have not been able to actually whittle down my favorite movies to the top five. I've got a top seven. But actually, now that I think about it, it's an odd continuation of your focusing on natural resources and natural disasters in the LA metro area. Chinatown is one of my favorite movies ever.

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Tyler Finn 

That's a great movie.

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Kevin Cohn 

Love that movie, and I think you're not supposed to love it anymore because, you know, Belanski got canceled. 

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Tyler Finn 

Yeah, yeah.

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Kevin Cohn

But fantastic movie, and I was just thinking of watching it tonight, so I might...

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Tyler Finn 

Wow. There we go. There you go.

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Matthew Wheatley

That good.

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Kevin Cohn 

Yeah. Watch it twice.

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Tyler Finn 

Our listeners aren't the only people being inspired by this podcast.

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Matthew Wheatley

There you go. I might watch it.

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Tyler Finn 

Book recommendation? Podcast recommendation? Movie recommendation? 

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Matthew Wheatley

Kevin didn't say this, but I'm not a big reader to be honest. I used to read more. Movie recommendation? I don't even know. I watched American Primeval on Netflix recently.

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Tyler Finn 

I haven't heard. What's that one about? 

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Matthew Wheatley

It's a series actually, so neither a book or a movie recommendation. But very good.

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Tyler Finn 

Not even in charge anymore

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Matthew Wheatley

Yeah, it's a Western, a Western series. Highly recommended.

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Tyler Finn 

All right. The final question. Well, you were a lawyer once upon a time. Usually I frame this as, you know, back when you were a young lawyer, but for you Kevin, it's back when you were getting started in business.

Kevin Cohn 

I'm 12 years older than this guy. How did that happen?

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Tyler Finn 

Something that you know now that you wish that you'd known back then?

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Matthew Wheatley

You want me to go first?

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Kevin Cohn 

Yeah, go for it.

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Matthew Wheatley

There is a lot that you can do with a law degree. So I mean, for me, graduating from law school, I really just wanted a job as a lawyer, ideally. And I kind of just stumbled into this path that I'm on now. And thankfully, I learned that. And I didn't learn it too late, but I could have done it sooner. And so, yeah, I think that, look, don't go to law school if you know you don't want to be a lawyer.

But if you went to law school and you've been a lawyer for X amount of time, you may have to make some tradeoffs, but you can do other things, and you can be on an upward trajectory doing things that you might like more. So, I know there's a lot of happy lawyers, but if you're an unhappy lawyer and you want to do something else, there are options.

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Tyler Finn 

That's great.

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Kevin Cohn 

I would say think outside in instead of inside out. For example, part of my job at Bright Flag is to grow our revenue, grow our business. Nowadays, I think about it in terms of how can I make the customers successful, and if that happens, then Bright Flag's success will follow. But earlier in my career, much earlier in my career, I would have said, how can I get as much revenue

from this customer as possible? That would have been my starting point. So that's a very inside-out way of thinking. I wish that I had learned the benefits of outside-in thinking even sooner than I did.

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Tyler Finn 

That's a great way to close. Kevin, Matt, thank you so much for- 

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Kevin Cohn 

Tyler. 

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Matthew Wheatley

Tyler. 

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Tyler Finn 

Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of The Abstract. 

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Kevin Cohn 

Thanks for having us.

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Matthew Wheatley

Yeah, thanks, Tyler.

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Tyler Finn 

And to all of our listeners, thanks so much for tuning in, and we hope to see you next And to all of our listeners, thanks so much for tuning in, and we hope to see you next time.

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