Michael Tamvakologos Reveals What Every Business Owner Needs to Know About AI and the Future of Law | S2 Ep. 163

0:04Hey everyone, welcome back to Founder Story. Today we have Michael Tam Vekologis partner at Saifarth Shaw. Michael, you've been featured in Forbes, Vanity Fair, rated by Pierce as a preeminent Australian employment lawyer for eight years running. You've even been voted by Best Lawyers as the Employee Benefits Lawyer of the Year in 2023. And you've been representing many of the world's most successful private and public companies. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Dan. Real pleasure to be with you. You've navigated both the legal and business worlds. Tell me about that and share your story of how you became successful as an attorney.

0:45Well, thank you. Thank you very much for that introduction. I've been very fortunate in my career to work with many of the leading companies in Australia and some globally. And to learn from a lot of really great people that I have interacted with along the way, whether that's inside my own law firm or just very intelligent and hardworking clients and business people who I've represented along the way. I really like how you're saying you're learning from your clients in different ways. I think we don't always look at it in terms of, you know, I'm helping this person, but also what this person can help for me.

1:32What is one or two learnings that you've had that every entrepreneur or every person who wants to be an entrepreneur needs to know? I think one of the key insights when working with leading business people is their ability to look behind the immediate issue that is confronting them. They really have a very deep sense of where they want the business to go, not only in the next week or the next month, but the next five or 10 years. They are typically long-term thinkers and all of their legal strategies, all of their commercial planning is geared around those long-term strategies. and that's something that over 20 years of legal practice has really I think also become part of my DNA to always look behind the immediate legal question that you've been asked to look beyond the dispute that you're looking to resolve in a particular case whether it's a dispute that has reached the court stage or it's at some earlier stage you're always really thinking about the deeper business implications of what you're doing.

2:48And I think that's something that clients see and appreciate. As you've continued to grow your business and you start working with bigger and bigger clients, what is something that you've learned in terms of when you go from smaller company, small clients, to then transitioning to a bigger company with bigger clients? What I find, particularly when you're dealing with very large listed companies, which are in Australia on, say, the Australian Stock Exchange, or in the US, they might be listed on the New York Stock Exchange or the NASDAQ, if they're technology companies, is as an advisor, we're dealing with many layers of governance, a number of decision makers within a large organisation.

3:35whereas if we're dealing with private companies, large family businesses for example, the decision making tends to be centralised within a smaller number of people or indeed in some cases a single person making all of the decisions. So understanding that rich tapestry of governance and decision-making and being able to communicate advice very effectively for all of those different people is really critical in a role like mine. And again, understanding the different business drivers that are motivating all of those people to make the decisions that they wish to make. That's really key. The other aspect that I would mention is I work in a team sport.

4:30It's a little bit like playing football. It's important to have the right players on the park. But what's equally important is that everybody work together in a very allied fashion, leveraging, of course, all of the latest technology. And I regard technology as an enormous plus. There's a lot of commentary about how technology will affect the legal profession in positive and negative ways. But my view is that properly harnessed, it can be a very powerful tool to help us work with our clients very effectively. Well, I'm glad you bring that up. There was a company recently that was acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars who is bridging the gap between AI and legal.

5:20And I found it very fascinating reading about this. What is your perspective on all these emerging technologies and how not only is it shaping the legal world, but also business in general? It's such a great question. And I think there's so much discussion about artificial intelligence at the moment. And clearly we're at the vanguard of something that is going to be very powerful. we should also think beyond artificial intelligence it hasn't happened yet but at some point we're going to have access to very powerful quantum computing technologies and other technologies which really change the way that all commerce across the globe operates my perspective on it is to see it as an enormous opportunity, but also an enormous challenge.

6:13We have to put in a lot of time and effort to really understand these technologies and how they can be used, how they can be used ethically, but also advantageously for the benefit of our clients. It won't surprise you to understand that in the legal profession, we deal with lots of documents. It's not uncommon for me in a large piece of litigation to be dealing with tens of thousands, sometimes over 100 ,000 documents, which need to be properly analysed and presented to a court. And technology, that's one example where technology can really help us to work very efficiently, get costs down and be more effective.

7:04There are also certain things though that technology is not going to replace. Technology is not going to replace the need for humans to connect with each other, to communicate effectively, to understand each other and our respective motivations and to work very collaboratively together in order to achieve the kinds of business outcomes that our clients expect. So technology I see mostly as a neutral thing and if we think about the important technologies of the past, whether it be the internet or email or even some other technologies like, for example, the splitting of the atom, they can be harnessed in very positive ways and very negative ways.

7:54And it's up to us humans as leaders and decision makers to decide where those technologies go into the future. I'm glad you bring up the emerging technologies. It's a lot of different technologies coming together in this one point. So when you review complex litigations and the many situations where your clients have had outstanding results. What are the secrets to success? Are there any common ingredients? There certainly are common ingredients. I mentioned earlier that being involved in large litigation is a little bit like being part of a highly successful football team where there are a lot of people involved, not only the players on the field, but those outside who are playing very important support roles.

8:46And what everybody needs to do is to perform their own role to the highest level possible and combine with each other so that when you've got large teams of people working together, for example, to see to resolve an important piece of litigation or see it through a trial which may last for many months and really test people physically, mentally, emotionally. We're all working together with that common goal and we all are very aligned and coming into that critical period have engaged in a very, very intensive level preparation. typically many months, sometimes years. In fact, just this week I had a judgment delivered in a matter which was a very successful outcome for our client which was 10 years in the making.

9:54It was 10 years ago that that litigation had commenced and it only resolved by judgment this week. So these things can be a marathon and we rely on quite a number of people to work at a very, very high level for a long period of time to achieve those kinds of outcomes. And my role as a partner of the firm is not only to be a strong individual contributor to that success, but also to support my team to try to get the absolute best out of them, ensure that they're enjoying their careers and able to do the best work that they can every single day. Every day we have to bring out a game and that's what we try to do.

10:44I think the most successful companies that we get to talk to would all agree that the team is critical to the success of any organization. I like being a football team. Everyone has different roles, they play different things. And when they work together, you can have great outcomes. So you have an incredible bookshelf behind you, which makes me think that you are an avid reader and you have to have at least one book that's been impactful for you or one book that you recommend to everyone who's in business. I do, Dan. Thank you. I have thousands of books here at home and I've enjoyed reading every one of them.

11:22If I had to single out a single book that I've read in recent times, it would be Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, the founder of Nike. Really an incredible story about the development of Nike from a very, very small business to the global giant that we all know and love today. That story really grabbed me because apart from being an incredible story of business success. Phil Knight is so raw and honest about what he had to go through personally, how building that company tested him and his team, including Bowman, in so many ways. And it's really quite a beautiful story of a group of friends who leaned on each other at so many critical points in their lives through all of the personal things that they had to go through, that all of us go through from time to time.

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13:50And there were so many points where Nike was really at a crossroads and might not have gone on to become what we now know it to be. There were business betrayals. There were huge financing problems, partnerships that broke apart. And Phil Knight and his team were really able, through sheer force of will, character and talent, just persevere through all of those things. and stories, for example, of receiving small amounts of equity funding from family members of the founders, which of course then later turned into, unbeknownst to all of them, probably when they made the investment, quite fabulous sums of money.

14:45It's just a really inspiring story, but also I think quite a realistic one because senior executives of large corporations, business founders, entrepreneurs, we tend to glamorize the success, but there's so much that sits behind that. And I think it's a really great story that tells that story very well. I learned a lot from that book. I really, really enjoyed that book. I think I've read it a few times. I did learn in reading that book, it's really critical that you have a great attorney in your business. I learned that for sure. Like you said, there's a lot of ups and downs in his life. And it seemed like being the founder of Nike must be the most amazing thing, not realizing it was a bumpy journey and road.

15:33But thank you for sharing that. If people want to get in touch with you, they want to find out more information, how can they do so? Well, I'm relatively easy to find, Dan, on Google. Our firm has a terrific blog titled The Workplace Law and Strategy Blog, where I and my partners do our best to provide really valuable insights to our clients that we think can help them to move the needle on their business success. It's not just information. It's not recent news. It's really high quality insights that allow us to take what we learned from clients and through our own experience and try to deliver a greater level of value to our clients.

16:15So please consult that. And of course, be in touch if I can assist with anything.