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Tyler Finn

Where is the legal innovation space headed? Is this an area where European businesses are actually investing more deeply than their American counterparts? And how can you transition your career to focus more on innovation and a little less on the law? Today, here in London, we are joined for this episode of The Abstract by Alex Herrity, Director of Global Legal Solutions at Adidas. Alex has been with Adidas for about 13 years or so and has held a variety of legal and legal ops roles, including serving as the interim head of legal for Adidas's North Europe and Nordic businesses. That seems kind of cool. Alex started his career as a trainee at a global law firm, was a paralegal before studying law. So you've been in the legal and legal adjacent space for quite a while. Thanks so much for joining me today for this episode of The Abstract.

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Alex Herrity

Yeah, really happy to be here and in London in a really warm day, which is pretty rare.

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Tyler Finn

Yeah, it's gorgeous out there.

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Alex Herrity 

Yeah, it's so nice. It's sweltering for me already. It's only like 15 degrees, but it feels super warm. But yeah, great to be here. Thanks for having me.

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Tyler Finn

I wish we could record outside. I mean, I know the light and the sound and all that wouldn't work so well, but...

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Alex Herrity 

Yeah, and people wouldn't believe us. It'd have to be AI for us to be in the sun in London.

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Tyler Finn

Okay, we're going to talk a lot about legal innovation is having a bit of a moment right now? Or has this been building for quite a while?

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Alex Herrity

Yeah. I mean, it feels like it's having a moment. I think it's had moments before. If you think back to e-discovery back in the day was a big topic, and CLM has had a moment prior to this one, I would say, that was maybe five to 10 years ago. And that's carried on bubbling away under the surface. Such a big topic. But obviously, we're into a very rich time now where there's tons of stuff going on. And I suppose the point of difference with this one is that it's happening at the same time as kind of other industries are having a moment with technology. Like the previous moments always felt like someone has used existing technology that might have been used in insurance or finance or somewhere else. And someone's had a thought to say, oh, let's disrupt legal. Or I'm a lawyer, and I want to do something better. And they've taken existing tech and made it work. Whereas this feels, obviously, slightly different because everyone's getting this stuff fresh as it comes out and it's live. And I guess the other points are that at this point in the maturity kind of journey for legal is now it's a different landscape than it was five years ago, 10 years ago, where those moments were happening, but there was tons of resistance, legitimate and illegitimate. But now there's people with my job, there's people with tons of jobs that wouldn't have existed five years ago, and they're able to, the environment's there essentially for the moment. So I think that's a massive thing that is kind of fertile ground for people to sow the seeds which hasn't always been there.

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Tyler Finn

That's really interesting. I hadn't thought of it quite like that before, which is, you know, if your biz ops team is leveraging similar types of technologies, or your RevOps team, or what have you, that, or underlying technologies, right? That that would both sort of give you the ability to invest in a way that you might have not been able to invest before, or maybe even like put a little bit of pressure on you to go and do something similar. Yeah.

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Alex Herrity 

Yeah, it's definitely there that there's that, there's an uptake across the business for this. So you're having conversations in a similar language, which is really rare for legal, particularly on legal talking tech. We're coming to, you know, prior to all of this, we're talking about stuff and it's like, what do you guys want to do? You need this, you need something for contracts. Like, this seems really confusing to us. And like, we don't really get what you want to do. And it feels like you're trying to bring some old tech in and we don't get it. Whereas now it's like, oh, okay, you've got some use cases for this stuff that we also have use cases for. And we're talking about this, a bit more as a user, amongst our peers, which is different. 

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Tyler Finn

I'm curious how you describe an innovation practice or legal innovation to other business stakeholders or how you characterize that. It's obvious that tech or things that you're procuring, you're building are part of that, but is this practice of legal innovation broader than just technology? How do you think about that?

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Alex Herrity

Yeah. I mean, obviously, I'm coming at it from an in-house perspective. So I guess private practice might have their own view on this, because that's their core business. But for us, it's kind of like, yeah, people might call it innovation or call it legal tech. I think I prefer to call it legal ops. Just feels like a wider, sort of a broader church for everything. So that exists. So we're able to say, yeah, it's in the house of legal ops and within legal ops, there is legal tech or tech that's used within legal ops. It doesn't have to be legal quote unquote tech. I think all of these, again, because we're in the legal space, people really pour over the terminology. Like, is that legal tech or tech? It's usually legal. And you're like, does it really matter? But OK, I get it. People want to get into the semantics of this stuff. And then, yeah, it's a philosophy. It's a discipline. It's a set of tools. It's all of the above. But yeah, the cool thing is it is quite a broad church now. There are roles there that just were never there before. And there's really diverse roles, because some people, legal tech and legal ops means external counsel management. And then for others, it means like pure techie. We're getting into the detail and the weeds. And we have like, we might have in our team developers. We might have in our team data analytics, data scientists. There's others where it's like, you're a legal technologist, which is kind of a new role. You're a legal engineer, a document engineer where you're au fait with these tools. And you're doing so, I mean, it's so wide, it's almost impossible and almost pointless in a way to put a label on it. So I would say it's legal ops. And then that is all about making the delivery of legal services optimal. And again, optimal is subjective, but let's say optimal, because whatever that means for that business and that team and that service, that's what we're trying to do, right? We're trying to put some cognition behind it, some thought, and then deploy sensible solutions that are scalable, that are maintainable, that deliver, you know. People say efficiency, I prefer effective, because you can make something that's really bad efficient, but it should be effective, which is then, again, something you contemplate and say, yeah, we're doing this the most effective way, rather than just the most efficient way.

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Tyler Finn

I like that. I mean, maybe that's the answer to this question. And we're going to talk about your journey a bit today as well, but you sort of stepped away from the practice of law to focus on legal ops. Why do you feel like this is such an important field? Or why do you think that it's so important for legal teams to have an ops function within them or working alongside them?

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Alex Herrity 

Yeah, it's a good question. I think just from doing, from daily practice, you just realize the bandwidth just isn't there. The reason lawyers do stuff in an archaic way sometimes is just purely because you're putting out fires. There's no better way to do it in the moment. You know, you need a, whatever that analogy is that you kind of need to oil the saw, but you need to stop soaring. So you have no time and it's kind of like, it just doesn't make, yeah, it's, it's so difficult. And I definitely felt that in my early days that you can see that there's a problem, but you just cannot get out of the daily to solve it. And now that there's all of this tech available and there's skills that are really focused on this stuff, you realize, yeah, it probably shouldn't be the daily job of a lawyer to do this on the side. There is definitely enough tasks and reasons and benefits to having like an ops function or an ops team or a person or someone who can dedicate some time. If it's worth doing, it's probably worth putting some time to it and some resource and I definitely feel like it's worth doing.

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Tyler Finn

One of the debates in legal ops that I think is interesting and I think is having a little bit of a moment right now is the importance of technology, yes, but also not forgetting about how you're doing a lot of process management or change management and how you have to bring people along with you here as well. How do you think about those different concepts? I don't know if it's a relative order of priority per se, but how do you think about making sure that you're focused on all of those things, that it's a relative order of priority per se, but how do you think about making sure that you're focused on all of those things, that it's not just about the tech?

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Alex Herrity

Yeah, no, that's definitely true and something that you tend to learn the hard way from doing this. When people warn you of it, you're like, yeah, okay. I remember going to the CLOC back in 2018 in Vegas, it was the first time I ever went. I remember seeing some talks that were like change management and I was like, this is just some corporate BS. Who needs this? These are all great ideas. And when I show them my great ideas, they're going to bite my hand off and we're going to put it in. It's going to be like, oh, Alex is the best. Carry him out on our shoulders. But yeah, I obviously then suddenly learned that no, that isn't the case. And change management is a real thing and process, you know, again, trying not to use hacky cliches, but you know, process eats tech for breakfast and all that kind of stuff. Like it just bears out time and time again, that if you neglect those things, if you want to shortcut those things, it comes to sting you. You've got to be so, so lucky just to guess your way through and vibe your way through on this stuff. And I'm saying that as, you know, even stuff where I was working on where I was working on it pretty regularly as a lawyer. So I felt like I knew everything, but I didn't know it from all angles. I didn't know the user experience necessarily. I didn't know what their concerns were. So when I'm advocating for that, it's definitely from the experience of these things will fail more readily and they fail more often when you don't put in the pre-work. And that's frustrating because you get sold a really great dream by people or vendors or whatever, because they show you how it can work, but there's tons of work to be done. And yeah, if you don't put the legwork in, it just doesn't work. Even with generative AI where there's a magic element to it, it feels like, it still requires, you know, it's a leap in technology, but I wouldn't say it leaps us past all of the groundwork that we had to do with all of the other technologies before. You still have to find out what's going on. You still wanna put the user experience at the forefront because, you know, just because it can deliver something in a way that was different and we never perceived before doesn't mean that's going to scratch the itch. Doesn't mean you're not going to have pushbacks. And we've had tons of interesting pushbacks, like document automation, where we did something and we did it without really consulting so much, because it was such a no-brainer. We felt like, super no-brainer, this is way better. And the feedback from one of the business stakeholders was like, oh, but does that mean you're not looking at these requests now? We thought you used to review these. And we were like, we used to literally just put the square peg in the hole or whatever. We weren't looking at the detail. And they were like, oh, we just felt better that legal were involved. And we were like, we weren't involved. We were just doing the data entry work. No one was checking any of this work, but they thought we were. And it was like, now we're putting it in here, The time saving to go from immediate from five days to zero. We don't care about that because legal aren't in the loop now. And we were like, okay, well, what do we do? And we joked like, could we just come up with like a five, a 10 minute delay or like a two hour delay and be like, here's your document back from legal. And it's like, it never touchedbrainer stuff, but if you're not into the detail, not into the processes, not into the people side, stuff comes out of the weeds and it really screws things up. 

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Tyler Finn

Yeah.

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Alex Herrity

So, yeah. 

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Tyler Finn

Let's put the fine point on it around AI actually, because I think it is interesting to think about a lot of legal tech solutions or a lot of tech solutions are really about workflows at their core maybe, right? And is AI going to change that or not? I mean, I guess I have a little bit of a perspective on it, which is that if the AI isn't tailored or if the sort of use cases aren't really clear, uptake is not going to be great because, I mean, yes, some people really want to play around in a generic sort of Gen AI tool and make something great out of it and use chat GPT for figure out the prompting themselves. But there's a lot of people who don't want to do any of that legwork, right? I don't know. What do you think about that sort of question of like, are workflows going to become less important with Gen AI or not? I'm curious.

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Alex Herrity

Yeah. an AI or not, or I'm curious. I think workflow is, again, it's one of those sort of pervasive things that every time I'm doing a project, it tends to be that the question that the lawyers tend to have very quickly, as soon as they kind of get comfortable with the basic premise, is like, and then next we do this. And you're like, oh, we just thought we were solving this part. And they're like, yeah, but the next thing is we put it over here, and then we do this. And this goes over there. And you're like, oh, we need workflow for that as well. And quite a lot of, particularly, point solutions really struggle with that because they're solving a real specific problem. And then, yeah, if you're an expert, it's really easy for you to get the benefit. And you're like, I'm crunching it in. I get my thing back. or you're trying to make things enterprise, people are like, oh, I send an email. It sounds kind of weird. And you're like, well, you send two emails now. But they don't care, right? As the workflow kind of, as you introduce more tech, they expect more from the workflow side, definitely. And I think, yeah, that is what we're seeing with some of the Gen AI stuff. It's still, in its moment, doing something incredibly powerful, very well, generally, if it's a well-defined use case, but it's usually best in the hands of an expert in that moment. And then, yeah, the workflow needs to carry on. So I'm really interested to see more and more of the tech. I think that's it, because a lot of really great products that I've seen, the concept of the thing they do in isolation is great, but I can tell that they haven't yet had the experience of what it's like in a legal organization and what would be adjacent to those parts of the process. And I think that's what they're going through now. So they've rushed something to market and they're kind of like, okay, now what's next? Oh, it needs workflow. It needs this. It needs to triggers. It needs kind of, oh, it's got to go off a signature and then come back somewhere. Like, all of this stuff is kind of boring. So maybe not the sexiest thing that everyone who works in AI wants to work in, but it's the reality, right? This is still business. This is still function. There is a home for something once it's been done. There is an approval process. There is like all these things that are not sexy still exist. So yeah, you have to kind of develop that side as well. 

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Tyler Finn

One of the things that I'm thinking a little bit about on this topic too is AI's ability to deliver on its promise, I guess. I'm very optimistic over the long run. But I also look at other sort of legal tech solutions and I would even, I would include CLM, which Spotdraft is in this category, which is... I think that there's a lot of amazing things that legal tech has done, but I also think that a lot of implementations, even maybe with folks who bought five years or 10 years ago failed, and there's a bit of a trust gap there. So I guess one question to you is, are there mistakes that you think have been made with prior tech solutions that we can avoid with Gen AI? And also a broader question here about its ability to deliver on the promise that it presents.

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Alex Herrity 

Yeah. I suppose that is it, in a sense, to the question. It promises so much, which you have to do. It's sales of, it promises so much and that is almost, which you have to do, you know, it's sales, right? So there is an element of like, we have to show you the best in class and we show you this stuff and we have to get you excited and show you what's capable. But it is that sort of the Delta, the and they said like, oh, how did it go? And it was like, oh it tanked and it was like the guy candidly said, you know, I knew you guys weren't ready Yeah, and I'm not saying, you know, plenty people wouldn't do that…

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Tyler Finn

Yeah

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Alex Herrity

There's plenty great vendor sales people totally that would say you guys aren't ready and we've had that before from people saying like oh 

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Tyler Finn

That's what you should do. 

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Alex Herrity

Yeah, yeah. Shout out to them for doing it the right way. But there's totally other people that are motivated in other industries as well that would be like, yeah, you should do this. And it could work or we could make that do happen for you. And it's to your point, even with the question, it's that sort of that gap between reality and just sort of being led down a path almost. I think sometimes the legal departments departments might just feel like, oh, you said it was this and we didn't have to do anything and the expectations were so high and the reality was so low. And I think CLM is a really great example of, you know, you hear that phrase CLM readiness. That isn't just, you know, it's not like TVs when they were like, it's 4k ready. And you're like, I have no idea what that means. My TV feels like it's been 4k ready for 10 years. I don't even know if I have 4K, but is my organization CLM ready? There's a ton of work that you can do, and there's a ton of different approaches that you can do. And I think that's going to be the same for the AI tools, where it's like, yeah, we can show you in isolation this really cool thing you can do, but are you ready to do that? If it's a bot that's going to sit on top of your policies and tell people what's in the policy. Are the policies ready? Do the policies need to be redrafted in mind for an AI to be optimal? Is there a workflow around that? Is there, you know, what should the tone be? Do we want people falling in love with these chatbots? I mean, pretty sad if you fall in love with your chatbot that tells you about like… 

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Tyler Finn

Your company policy…

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Alex Herrity 

Compliance policy. But you know, we're already hearing that it's a complex and it's a new thing. So I think bridging that gap and really getting into the detail, again, nobody wants to do it because it's kind of boring, but it is the reality. You get what you put your effort in for, I think.

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Tyler Finn

How are you thinking about all of this in your role? And where are you leaning in or where are you sort of taking a we need to wait and see approach? Like, yeah. How are you actually sort of like practically leading the business through this, I guess?

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Alex Herrity

Yeah. I mean, the, the sort of tone I think for me at least is kind of, we shouldn't be led by AI. It shouldn't be, it's the idea that because it exists in just in the same way that it should have been before AI, it's because that tool exists, doesn't mean we need to use it. And it should be more intentional about what is it that we're trying to do as a legal team? What are we trying to deliver? Why are we trying to do this? There's tons of things in that legal operations house that are not tech, and that can be processed, that can be, you know, is the biggest friction point actually our templates are terrible? Or our stance on this is wrong, and that's what's causing all the friction. And actually, an AI solution or a CLM solution isn't really gonna fix that for us until we fix this point. So it's, yeah, at the moment we're thinking, being way more intentional, looking at like, what can you stop doing? What makes sense to automate rather than use AI? What makes sense to outsource? Like there's still traditional models that it's like, hey, just because we could do it and we could buy some tech to do it, is that the best way? Let's throw it over to a specialist. Let's throw it to someone else. So what we're trying to do is, yeah, not get sort of lured in by the shiny lights. But then to the extent that we are thinking about AI, it is more like, I think most people are still in experimental mode, I would say. Again, it's so dangerous to go on record and say stuff like that, because there'll be people like, well, I do this and I do that. Of course, there are people that are doing stuff that's really cool. And they know what they're doing. They feel really comfortable. You know, speaking to someone the other day, and he was like, people say you need to do all this, one that, and I built something the other day and it was really successful. And I was like, yeah, but you're like a lawyer of like, a techie, a very techie lawyer with like 15 years experience and you knew exactly what you were doing and you delivered something. That is not the bar. Like the bar is way, way lower. So I think again, it's, yeah, it's all about intentions, I think. looking for use cases that where the primary, the core idea makes sense. And then we have the infrastructure and the sort of the workflow to support it as well.

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Tyler Finn

I want to ask you a bit about your own journey into legal ops. Yeah. You know, okay, let's start here. I mean, if we go back to the start of your career, what was it that motivated you to become a lawyer in the first place or at that point in time?

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Alex Herrity

I was thinking about this before because I thought you might ask me this and I was like, do I have a really cool story about why I wanted to be a lawyer? I was like, I don't think I actually do, but as a kid I always wanted to be a barrister, which for international folks is kind of the solicitors and the barristers. So typically solicitors don't go into court. You can do it now, you can get like higher rights and do it. But yeah, I was always really fascinated by that, like the criminal side of law. And in my family, I've got quite a few like police officers. So it was always something that was like sort of in my peripheral vision. And then I studied history and politics actually at university. history teacher, you know, I'm going to become a history lecturer, that's kind of all the options are. And I was like, no, but then law kind of, to me, and I've said this to other people and they didn't agree with me, but I was like, history and law feels kind of similar, like making arguments, primary sources, secondary source, all that kind of stuff. And politics, obviously, again, sort of adjacent in that world and becoming more and more relevant, So yeah, it just felt like kind of like the vocational practical version of being a historian in a way, sort of working with, and there's tons of people in the UK at least who do the conversion from doing a history degree quite often, or one of the sort of humanities into law. So yeah, that's how I ended up doing it. And yeah, super random, just thought, yeah, let's go for it. And yeah, it worked out.

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Tyler Finn

I mean, politics is just like history happening in real time, right?

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Alex Herrity

Yeah, exactly.

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Tyler Finn

The law underpins a lot of those discussions and debates in history.

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Alex Herrity 

I needed you with me when I was with this guy. And he was like, but you can say the same about maths. You can say it. And I was like like a, just a paralegal job in like a, the first law firm that I found, which is kind of high, we'd call it high street in the UK, like very small, like maybe 40, 50 employees or something. So not mega small, but small-ish. And they were doing like personal injury and debt stuff, like none of the glamorous stuff, but at the time that's what it was. 

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Tyler Finn

Real lawyer.

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Alex Herrity 

Yeah, exactly. Lionel Hutz-esque stuff. And yeah, in that role, just ended up doing like, again, maybe we'll come onto this, but my personality has always been sort of, I always wanna do something slightly different to what I should be doing. Sure. So I always give the example of like, I did Russian at school for one of my language choice. 

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Tyler Finn

Interesting.

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Alex Herrity

And every week, the teacher had a vocabulary test and, you know, set you this 20 words or whatever you got to do it. And then there was always a bonus question, which was like capital cities. Because he was just like, oh, and for a bonus point for anyone struggling, what's the capital of blah. And I would spend more of my time learning capital cities than I would the vocab test.

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Tyler Finn

Actual Russian.

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Alex Herrity

Yeah, just yeah. And they'd be like, oh, Alex, you got four. And it's like, well, you did get the capital question right. And I was like, yes. And I don't know if there's something weird in my brain that made me always wanted to do something different. Because when I was paralegaling, I ended up helping them run their website and then helping them do some of the IT type stuff, just because I was like, the horizon in a weird way. And then yeah, when I qualified as a lawyer, we had some, maybe a year or so in, we had a problem that we wanted to solve where it was a contracts related one. And it was like, we had all this data to make all these contracts. And the minute we had the template and we just needed to create like a thousand of these like bespoke, but based on the same draft. And yeah, it was like, there's gotta be a way to get all this Excel data into a Word document. And it was like, well, there you go. You've given me like the, the air counsel, again, really smart guy. Don't know if he knew that about me and was like, what do you think about this, Alex? And he kind of nudged me a little bit. And it was like YouTube videos, forums, learning a little bit how to do like VBA coding. Cause we had no budget. We had nothing to figure it out. And it was like, yeah, six weeks later, I was like, I built this yeah, it works. And we've kind of made something happen here. And that was the concept. And in the end, it ended up being rolled out to 20 different countries, all these different languages. It's generated hundreds of thousands of these documents, which is crazy and really cool. But that was just coming up to 2016-17, when the final versions of that were happening. And that was when all the corporate started going for legal ops. And a different general counsel was like, we wanna do it. You're now the, you're the legal tech guy. And I was like, I'm the legal tech guy. So I had the interesting conversation to be like, do I wanna stop doing law, which I've been, you know, practicing law for like, whatever it would have been like five, six years then as a legal counsel. 

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Tyler Finn

Not an insignificant amount of time. 

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Alex Herrity

No, no. As a qualified lawyer, at least. And then maybe three or four years before that, in terms of paralegaling and trainee. So a decent amount, under my belt. And then it was like, yeah, do you want to get rid of this now and do the day-to-day legal ops stuff and legal tech? And it was like, yeah, OK. So let's go for it. 

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Tyler Finn

Take us through that decision a little bit. Like, were you apprehensive? Were people saying, did it look like this was the future? Right? I mean, like at that point in time. Yeah. Talk to us a little bit about that. 

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Alex Herrity

Yeah. I think I was lucky in a way. Like maybe it happened like just around the right time for me to be like, there's clearly legs in this. The vendors are there, the seed rounds are happening. People are putting money in and it's like, well, money is probably the biggest play of looking at it, I guess, in terms of if people are investing in this, someone thinks it's going to go. And yeah, so I was a little bit lucky. There were definitely other reference points. And there were people in the industry that I'd met. So I met a lady called Catherine Bamford. Bam Legal, she's like a Doc Auto expert. And she was just through one of the law firms. She's really like definitely worth looking her up because she's super smart. But I was like, oh, she's doing it. And she's an ex-lawyer. She used to work for Pins and Masons in another big firm in the UK. And I was like, she's done it. And I've got this opportunity. So it makes total sense. I definitely had the angst of like, oh, are did this, you trained to be it, and now you're getting rid of it. Like, why are you doing that? And I still have it with my grandma where she's like, what do you do? And I was like, just tell people I'm a lawyer because that's totally, I still am a lawyer, so that's fine. And I still do legal work kind of still on the side. 

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Tyler Finn

I'm sure, I guess we talked about this a little bit. I mean, this is a very large and very global legal org. Actually, what has your remit been as you've done legal ops? Or how has that grown over time?

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Alex Herrity 

Yeah, I think typically if you're doing it in an organic way like I did, rather than there's a mandate that's clearly given to you straight away, it tends to be you start in the area you know, and maybe this would be good advice for someone who's thinking about this. I was, my primary focus at the start was contract-related-y type things because that's what I'm doing. When I was transitioning over, and then it was kind of more legal matter management type-y things, or external counsel management, because again, I was doing that in my daily as a lawyer, so it was really transferable. But yeah, in terms of the sort of wider org and things like that, it very quickly became a global thing, particularly for a global organization, large one. And that's thrown up, again, tons of things that you wouldn't think about. Like we were talking about cultural differences. 

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Tyler Finn

Sure.

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Alex Herrity

I don't wanna say good and bad, but challenging and beneficial actually, like where, oh, this country over here, they have a way bigger appetite for this kind of stuff versus over here. They need something different. I was having a conversation with one of my Chinese colleagues just this last week and they were talking about, um, the chop process. So instead of signatures, which you must know, I guess from CLM Signature. 

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Tyler Finn

Well, yeah. I spent a little bit of time in China when I was a kid, so I'm familiar with this.

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Alex Herrity

Yeah. And just that.

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Tyler Finn

You can explain it to the audience for folks who don't know. It's really interesting.

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Alex Herrity

Yeah, it's really interesting. Yeah, I mean, the highest level, just that they, instead of using signatures or an e-signature tool, things they call chops, which are kind of like these little blocks or these stamps that they apply. And that sort of shows that the company is signed on its own behalf kind of thing. 

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Tyler Finn

They're kept in safes… 

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Alex Herrity

Basically. Kept in safes, yeah. They have these real devices that they do it with. And again, that comes out in a conversation because we're looking at our process for getting things signed and how we do that. And the assumption is, oh, well, everyone's using DocuSign or Adobe Sign or any signature tool. And then there's a whole swathe of the country, sorry, the globe where they have a totally different process and it would not work because there is no digital equivalent of that. It has to be done in that way. And the law and the culture hasn't adjusted at that point. Like it has in Hong Kong, but it hasn't in China and Hong Kong obviously, as we know, has such a different British connection for so long. So maybe that's why the law there has been a little bit more happy to use e-signatures. But it was just one of those, like just literally happened last week where we're just talking about that. And it's like, yeah, of course we now need to think of like a sub process for the Chinese market. And then it's like, I wonder if they have the same in Japan and in Korea. And they do have versions of that, but they also do have a different tolerance for e-signature. So obviously I could just waffle on for hours about this, but that's the thing that makes it super exciting in a global context is cultural challenges, language challenges, AI is kind of cutting through some of that. But again, if you're in a jurisdiction where the training set hasn't been trained on, this very obscure dialect that's being used, then you can't make the assumption that it's going to give you the same results as in English, for example. So yeah, it throws up lots of cool stuff, which is good fun.

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Tyler Finn

In that example, obviously you're going to need a different process in a different place. Maybe the lawyerly answer, it depends, is what happens here. But how do you manage needing, say, different processes around things where maybe there isn't a strong cultural difference, but maybe the team in one country just doesn't want to change their workflow, as opposed to a team in another country says, we're happy to do that because clearly we agree this is more effective or more efficient or whatever word we wanna use. I mean, I guess another way to put that question is like, how do you bring global teams along with you or sort of reconcile some of those differences?

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Alex Herrity

Yeah, it's again, a challenging one and I'm sure it does depend, but I would say my general answer would be, I prefer the carrot over the stick. Yeah. The general answer would be, I prefer the carrot over the stick. Definitely in some organizations, in some cultures, the stick is just the way it would go and it would be like, you're changing, it's mandated, the GC says so, so it is so. But I think majority of organizations just don't tend to work like that. And actually the best way is to take them on a transformational journey. And actually most of the maybe more challenging heads of department or legal or whatever that I've come across, they kind of want to just see a little bit outside their... If you can show them outside their own sphere, they can kind of get a bit more comfortable with it. So yeah, I would prioritize initially those people who are on board and show them and then make a special plan for those resistance. We used to have a colleague where we were like, if we can get him on board, and we got everyone on board. So he had like his own lane, essentially. It was like, all these people, are they going to be the adopters? This is going to be the anti-adopter, or this person, a couple people, and we're going to bring them kind of both on the journey. And the big to be like, you know, person X is, is into it and we're going to celebrate that and push it. And we've definitely had wins where someone's like, I would never do, you know, I want this to be a manual process. I'm, you you how it would be in practice for you and what your daily job would be now. And they're like, oh, I get it. And this is way better. And it saves some trees. Like whatever. Some people are like, oh, and this will save all this paper. And you're like, oh, that's a driver for you. Yes, it will. So we've had tons of those experiences. 

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Tyler Finn

That's so interesting, taking this person who's very skeptical, who you probably most likely be very frustrated by, and instead kind of turning it into a positive of, if I can get this person on board.

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Alex Herrity 

I think it's dangerous to ignore them as well, right? Because it's like, businesses are an ecosystem. It's still just a playground, essentially. And people will go against you if they feel like they're being, again, more political organizations, the worse it is, and different cultures are different. But I think it's really, you'd be remiss to ignore those people and just be like, we'll deal with them at the end and finally get  them on board when there's like nowhere for them to go. I backed them into a corner. I don't feel that works because they'll, they will work against you in the queue. Like, oh, it's trying to throw curveballs at it and trying to break it and not in the way that you want them to. Like when you can get them to do that in a nice environment, then I think that makes sense. But yeah, don't forget those people at your peril. 

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Tyler Finn

Yeah, I mean, if one person has a silent concern, other people probably have silent concerns as well.

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Alex Herrity

And they'll blow it up. They'll make it more of a concern. do this, you know, so yeah. 

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Tyler Finn

You know, one of the things I'm also really interested in to hear from you is where you see the Adidas LegalOps org evolving over the next few years, and also where you're hoping that, like having a, you have a very strategic LegalOps career, right? And I think that that's what a lot of folks who may be sort of like trying to get their foot in the door on LegalOps and say, okay, I'm going to start as a CLM specialist, or I'm going to start helping run our e-discovery platform. But eventually, I want to get to that point where I'm doing really sort of like org-wide, strategic-level work that's working very closely with the GC or the DGC or whoever it is. So where you're hoping your org is gonna go, but also where you're hoping your own sort of role and abilities are gonna grow and go.

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Alex Herrity

Yeah, I think every, again, speaking for people that I don't know, but I feel like everyone who's doing this, my role at this kind of level is thinking, you feel like that role should have a seat at the top table. Maybe everyone thinks that when they're doing it, like compliance or whatever, And it's like, it feels like that's the way it's going that because we're delivering more data, we're delivering more insights that you feel like you would be a really valuable partner on the kind of the senior leadership team and sitting around with the other DGCs or whatever with the GC. So I feel like that feels like the natural way to go. Definitely seeing more people where it feels like more and more of the actual work is kind of falling into the ops teams remit as well, I guess because it's all going through a machine or a tool that they're in charge of. So there's an element where they're a bit more hands on in a way. So that kind of, again, I think elevates you a little bit. I guess in private practice world, it was always like the fee earner. If you bring in the fees, then you've got a different level of clout. So versus just being back office. And it feels like maybe that transition will happen that where if your legal ops people are more directly involved, being doing like more detailed business partnering and partnering with the lawyers, you're kind of part of that squad instead of the back of everything and running things behind the scenes. So for me, it feels like the journey for legal ops teams in large corporates is to get to that level and start influencing. And I have seen like job roles already where people talk about a head of legal ops also being kind of a chief of staff, which seems really interesting to me. I had never considered that before, but again, kind of makes sense. And you could see that that those skills do sort of, it helps the GC run the, you know, maybe focusing on the board and the CEO, and then they can delegate that sort of running all the activities that need to be run just to keep everyone ticking over to more of an operational team. So that's, yeah, that would be really interesting. And then I would say personally for me, I've never had a plan. I'm not clearly not, I'm not a planner, which is probably bad for my, my, my role. Cause we do have lots of plans and we come up with stuff. But in terms of my career, it's like, you know, just keep going where the next weird earworm, the weird next plenty of rocks to turn over and figure out like, oh, do we need to go at this now? We've got tons of different practice areas within our team. There's like 39 different teams makes up our larger team. So yeah, okay, let's get into trademarks now.  Let's get into IP. You know, stuff is happening in those places already, but there's always, you know, it's always resource. source, or if we got more people, or we got new tools. Yeah, so right now, there's plenty to keep me going, I think.

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Tyler Finn

In the US, I think that we'd say you'd be a really great Jeopardy contestant, or the personality for that.

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Alex Herrity 

OK, cool.

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Tyler Finn

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Alex Herrity

That's cool.

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Tyler Finn

Do you have advice for folks who might want to try their hand at ops? And actually, I'd be curious to hear that from a couple of different perspectives, even like maybe someone who has some paralegal experience or right. And also someone who maybe is a lawyer and is working as a lawyer and is thinking to themselves either. I like this, or I don't love this as much as I thought I would, but I feel like if I was doing something a little more businessy or a little more operational, that might be rewarding.

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Alex Herrity

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's a few different things, I suppose I would say. So if you're at the coalface doing stuff, then you probably have the best opportunity to fix a real problem, which is always nice. Like having something that isn't synthetic, just coming up with a great idea is one thing. But it doesn't have to be a grand idea. It should be something real. If you solve a real problem and that could be something you're, you're a paralegal, you've come into a team. Typically these teams don't have a lot of time to think about what they're doing operationally unless they've got a lot of support. So there'll probably be rich pickings for you. Even it's super low hanging fruit. It will be there and, you know, have a go, like start, start playing around with it. And depending on what kind of organization you're at, that's something you could probably do and then deliver and be like, look at this thing I did. And you might get some pats on the back. If it's not that kind of organization, just be a little bit savvier about it and be like, I noticed these things. I think we could do like this, like choose the right person and work together and make it a success. That's kind of how you might potentially grow into that kind of role there where people realize you're the legal tech guy like they did with me. That's possible. I would say in the, and again for lawyers, a similar kind of thing, again, harder to do potentially, you might just be so overwhelmed with work. But also, you know, now there's places that you could seek out, like there's firms that have a really great reputation for doing this kind of thing. So why don't you work for them instead of the firm that you're at? Or there's companies that are doing this, they have a legal ops function. So, you know, you don't have to do everything from scratch. So maybe that would be a consideration you'd have for your next role that you want Like I don't, I want to go meet an in-house counsel somewhere, but I want to go to a place where they're doing cool stuff. So that's going to be a criteria that you might put on your head that you wouldn't have done in the past. Cause it's all pretty opaque. So I would ask that at, you know, those interviews, like, what are you doing for this? Do you have a CLM tool? Like these are all legitimate questions. Cause I think now and in the near future, in terms of like what a legal counsel who focuses on contracts does at an organization that has a state of the art CLM is totally, totally different to what it's gonna be for someone who does everything by the sweat of their brow. So again, if that's something that's relevant for you, try and seek that out. So yeah, and again, finally, maybe the last one, there's tons of stuff now that you can, if you wanted to make your own product or you wanted to make your own solution, there's tons of things that are, you know, the barriers are coming down for that, I would say. Like you can do stuff with these no-code platforms are a really good sandbox. Like even if it's just in your organization, like the power platform in Microsoft, but there's plenty of others where it's pretty cheap to play or free even to play and you can develop an idea, sandbox it. And even all of the different LLMs now give you pretty good stuff in terms of basic coding for you to be able to get an MVP, minimum viable product that you could maybe show someone. So it is a great time if you wanna do stuff because there's organizations that are open to it now. There's places to go, there's investors that wanna invest. So depending on whatever your jam is, I feel like you could find that now if you open your eyes to it.

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Tyler Finn

That's fantastic advice. I really like your second point about thinking about sort of the culture of the team and the people that you're joining and where they are. I mean, whether they already have tech solutions or they want you to invest in that or, yeah, that's actually really interesting to think about as a criteria or as a question that you might ask at the end of an interview. Like ask the general counsel, in what ways do you use AI in your day to day? You'll probably learn a lot about them and right, just from a basic question like that.

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Alex Herrity

Yeah, it's always a struggle to think of what that question should be. So that is a good one if you're thinking, but also like it definitely has changed in the last five years and more so in the last two or three years where that isn't a weird question anymore. I can imagine there would have been a time where the GC would have been like, we don't want this person. They want to look under the curtain too much, like forget him. Whereas now I think they would be a little bit more open to it and they've been thinking about it. it back to you and to be like, what would you want it? So do your research a little bit, but yeah, it's there. 

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Tyler Finn

Okay. I know you've also started a podcast as well. I saw you had my friend, Sean West on who has recently released a fantastic book. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about the podcast.

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Alex Herrity

Yeah. Well, everyone has a podcast now. It's got to have a podcast. 

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Tyler Finn

I mean, if I can do it, anyone can do it. 

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Alex Herrity

I don't know about this. It's a really cool setup. It puts us to shame. But yeah, with my friend Tom Rice, so he's a senior director at Travel Perk, a travel company. So very strong lawyer background, but also he's super into tech, particularly AI type stuff. And we just talk all the time, you shoot ideas around, like everyone has their own little network tends to have, you know, if it's, if it's your legal counterparts or I'm in tons of groups with like GCs and stuff where people are firing questions. Yeah, Tom and I were just talking, we said, we go to these events and we talk to each other and that's probably the best thing at the event. No, no, no, no shade on anyone. There's still good content of these things, so go to it. But I guess maybe we're at a stage now where we're maybe at a maturity level where some of the stuff on stage isn't that relevant for us. But the people who attend is where the gold is. So we talk to each other, we speak to people at those events, and we were just like, well, should we just record them and make them available? So we didn't have... Just because people might be interested because we're in a privileged position. We have really good access to interesting people and they're willing to tell us some stuff and if they're willing to tell it and put it on record, then we're like, well, would you do it that way? And typically I would say in the legal ops, and maybe you've experienced this as well with, cause you're coming up to like almost a hundred by the time we're recording, people are pretty generous with their time and generous with their insights. And it's not very sort of nasty, even like vendor to vendor, like I see CLM partners talking to each other, sharing good ideas. 

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Tyler Finn

I want to give back.

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Alex Herrity

Yeah, it doesn't have that nasty kind of tone to it at all. And it's been like that for so long now. So that's great that that continues. But yeah, so we were just like, let's make this stuff. We will do it because we enjoy having the conversation, which we're going to have, we'd have the conversation anyway. And these days it's not a huge lift just to record that and quickly put it online. And yeah, we, we, we have no agenda, I suppose. So we don't have the, there's nothing to put out there other than we thought this was interesting. You consume it at your will or don't, which is totally fine. Um, so yeah, so we're like four episodes in, we've got another four that we've kind of done and yeah, we have no plans. So we're like, what do we do next? Is this good enough as it is? And we've had some nice comments and we have a sub stack as well. So we're trying to write some articles as well, just our thoughts and put it out there and just let people consume it. I think maybe could just be, it's just another way of, I guess it's vlogging, it's blogging, it's just in a slightly different way. So, and we do video as well, because we want to try to push screen sharing a little bit. So trying to show people some stuff if we can. Again, we've had a little bit of uptake on that, where someone can say, I'm happy to show what that means in reality. 

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Tyler Finn

Oh, that's cool. 

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Alex Herrity

Which I think puts a bit of meat on the bones for some people.

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Tyler Finn

That's an interesting idea. Yeah, wouldn't work in a setting like this, but I like that idea. That's cool. And if people want to find it, I mean, they could find you on LinkedIn, find Tom on LinkedIn. How should they do that?

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Alex Herrity

LinkedIn is cool. I mean, LinkedIn is interesting. It's a fun place, not for everyone, but yeah, I'm on LinkedIn, Tom's on LinkedIn, but yeah, it's called Law What's Next, because we just, we're very wide in scope. It could be anything, but yeah, we're on Spotify, and by the time you see this, it'll be Apple Music and YouTube as well. Just putting out there to whatever people consume on, so, you know.

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Tyler Finn

Fantastic. Okay. I've got some closing questions for you. Sort of my traditional closing questions. The first one is if you could tell us about your favorite part of your day to day. 

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Alex Herrity 

Oh wow. My favorite part of my day today. I probably say it's still checking in with my team and hearing what people up to and it still blows my mind like the conversations that they have. So even, I think this is something that happens a lot in this space is it is still way people first. So hearing people talk about like a new challenge that's come across their desk or hearing. So the one-to-ones that we have or the little team meeting, we've tried tons of different ways of doing it. Like everyone's gotta be standing up. Everyone, we only got to do in 15 minutes. We try and constantly to make it cause we're a multi-discipline, multi-location team. But that for me is always really, really fun. It's really interesting. You see people excited about what they're doing and that kind of motivates me. So yeah, I would still say it's those, that connection with my team a challenge, but also it's something, you know, we have a colleague in the US, West Coast, we've got a colleague in, got colleagues in Europe. So it is a challenge, but good fun.

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Tyler Finn

Do you have a professional pet peeve?

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Alex Herrity

Oh my gosh.

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Tyler Finn

I think this is a fun one.

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Alex Herrity

Yeah, do I have a professional pet peeve? Well, it's so abstract and so weird. I really hate when people sign off their email best. I really hate that. I don't know why. It's just one of those things.

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Tyler Finn

I write all the best.

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Alex Herrity

All the best is fine.

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Tyler Finn

Do you hate that? 

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Alex Herrity

No, no. Just best, comma, and then their name. It really antagonizes me. Obviously, people spelling people's names differently than how they sign themselves off on, like just as a courtesy, really frustrates me. I'm really petty, so my pet peeves are like the most pointless and nonsensical things. Yeah, it's all kind of just about respect, I think, for me. So I like the idea that everyone should be on the same level, let's all be respectful. If they call themselves X, call them X. That's what they wanna be called, that's totally easy to do. So all of those things, just respect generally, I think, is my biggest thing. Not in the sense of, oh, I'm super important. It's just we're all humans. And working in this job, I think, reminds you to be human more often than not.

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Tyler Finn

That's a great answer. Do you have a book that you would recommend? And this doesn't have to be a business book. It could be a fun book, you can have two or three books, that doesn't matter. But do you have a book that you'd recommend to our audience?

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Alex Herrity

Yeah, I guess just reading wise, like just in terms of fiction, I read a read, I probably everyone's read this recently because it was kind of a bestseller, but Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow.

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Tyler Finn

Oh, I haven't read this yet. 

Alex Herrity

Really good. So if you're into fiction, that's just one fresh, fresh off my mind that I read recently and enjoyed. And then kind of stuff in this space, someone who's really good is Alex Hamilton from Radiant. He wrote the book, Sign Here, which is all about contract processes. And basically he's got a sort of fixed fee style law firm, and it's all about kind of the, it's all of the non-techie part of the contracting process around like, you know, how you can, how contracts should be. They should be these like relational documents where people, so you wouldn't, you shouldn't draft them in an adversarial way. You should be drafting them with the least amount of friction while still protecting your needs. So if you, again, if you're into contracting and tech and this stuff, it's not about the tech, but it's about the content in a different way, in a fresh way. So I totally recommend that. And there's one more that I'm reading right now, which is quite good, which is like how to build a second brain. So I'm really interested in sort of knowledge management at the moment. And that's kind of one of my topics that's personally interesting to me as well as professionally. And his thing is just basically just a concept for like how you, what you should outsource to a database and how you might do that and have a process for that. But then how that might then work with like a team of different people. Again, I think super relevant for this era that we're now going in where we're knowledge workers. Like I never heard I never got called a knowledge worker until ChatGPT, but it's like, yeah, I'm a knowledge worker. And it's like, what am I doing with all this knowledge and where does it sit? And how is this AI going to work with this? So I think if you're going to read anything about knowledge and how you might use your own knowledge, that's been cool. I'm halfway through that one, so I'd give that a recommendation as well.

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Tyler Finn

That's a good mix there. I like that. 

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Alex Herrity

Yeah, a few different things. Yeah, take your pick. 

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Tyler Finn

Yeah. My last question for you, Alex, my traditional closing question for my guests, it's if you could look back on your days of being a young lawyer just getting started, something that you know now that you wish that you'd known back then.

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Alex Herrity

Oh, wow. I think probably that people want you to meet them where they are. And I think sometimes you can feel as a lawyer a little bit like, a bit loyally. Sort of like, I need to produce this thing, which is a great tome, a great work that I've done. And actually you don't always need the Rolls Royce job of everything. And actually sometimes people need you to meet them where they are essentially. This isn't always their priority, like for them sometimes getting the contract or the legal advice is part of their process. So as cogs in a machine sometimes or ships in the night, all the other cliches, I think sometimes, yeah the most important thing is actually to meet them where they are and that's to understand what's where their question's coming from, understand what they actually really need from you, rather than being like, oh, this is what I do, and this is what you shall receive from me. And it's attached to the email, there you go. Also, people don't care about, when you list in an email, the three attachments, you don't have to always go back and make sure that they're in the same order as you've attached them. I'm coming back to my pet peeves now, But it's like the amount of time that I spent doing weird legal stuff where you're like putting everyone in CC in the order of their seniority and stuff like that. And it's like… 

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Tyler Finn

Oh, thank God. I've never had to do that before. 

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Alex Herrity 

Yeah. There's some weird stuff that people do. And actually, I feel like you can jailbreak some of that and be like, I'm just not going to partake in that. that's actually going to help them rather than giving them what my idea of what a lawyer should do and what what I think is What people expect of me, so.. 

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Tyler Finn

That's a great answer, Alex thank you so much for recording this episode. Yeah here in London.

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Alex Herrity 

This has been a lot of fun. Thanks so much

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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 time.

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