SurePoint's New CEO Jeff Steinberg on the Mandate for Change

0:02Today on Lawnext, I speak with Jeff Steinberg, the newly named CEO of SharePoint Technologies, a company that provides practice management, finance, and growth technology products for mid-sized law firms. On July 23rd, SharePoint named Steinberg to succeed Eric Thurston, who'd previously been on this show and who had run the company since 2023 and now moves up to executive chairman. Steinberg is no stranger to legal tech. In 2000, he founded Redwood Analytics, one of the first companies to convince law firms that their own financial data could tell them something useful about profitability. He sold that to LexisNexis in 2008, and then spent much of the intervening years outside legal as an executive board member and advisor to multiple companies.

0:53He also served as a senior advisor to Aqualine Capital Partners, the private equity firm that backs SharePoint. SharePoint is a company with unusually deep roots for legal tech. It traces its origins back to 1982. Steinberg arrives there on the heels of its having made four major acquisitions in the last four years of Coyote Analytics, Contactees, Leopard Solutions, and most recently, Zencase. So is Steinberg's appointment a mandate for change? In our interview, he tells me unequivocally, it is. And he is also candid that the integration work from those acquisitions isn't finished. We also get into where he draws the line between machine learning and generative AI and a system firms need to trust completely, and why he thinks the middle of the market has proven more resilient than people predicted.

1:43He also tells us the three priorities he's set for his first year. I'm Bob Ambroji, and this is Law Next, the podcast that features the innovators and entrepreneurs who are driving what's next in law. Before we get to any of that, please take a moment to hear from the sponsors who so generously support this podcast.

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2:59You can easily set up automated payment plans for your clients and accept payments via credit card, ACH, and e-check. Learn how LolliLaw can simplify your billing operations and streamline your immigration practice by visiting LolliLaw.com today. That's L-O-L-L-Y-L-A-W dot com. Now let's get to today's conversation. Jeff Steinberg, welcome to Law Unetched. Thanks, Bob. Appreciate you having me on here. I'm happy to meet you. And I've been able to interview your predecessor on this show. Actually, about a year ago, Eric Thurston, the previous CEO, was on the show to talk about the acquisition of Zencase.

3:51And before that, I had had the founder of Zencase on the show along with Olivia Mockle, who is now your COO, before they were acquired. So we've got a little bit of a history of talking about SurePoint on this podcast, but I'm looking forward to diving more into your coming aboard and what that means for the company. But first of all, I have to ask you about this because I was looking at your LinkedIn profile and I'm fascinated to see that you are also the founder of a bourbon distillery. Is that right? So a bourbon trading company, yes. Okay. We spent a little time diving deeply into supply chain dynamics, which is nice to be back in the legal industry after that.

4:39Okay. So obviously last week it was announced that you are taking over the role as CEO of SharePoint. Although you have worked in multiple verticals, as you just described, one of them, you're not new to legal tech. And in fact, you had a start in legal tech a number of years back. So can you kind of tell us a little bit about your history and how you got to this point? Yeah, absolutely. So I started my career in finance and all around fundamental values of companies and decided if I was going to be any good at finance, I should actually try to operate something. And so ended up working with a 50-attorney law firm in New York around 2000 or so that had a lot of challenges around thinking about profitability, around generational transfers from senior partners to junior partners, thinking about how to grow their business.

5:39And, you know, we were able to sort of uncover this need around actionable metrics. And so I started a company called Redwood Analytics. My partner, Norm Mullick, Chris Sakunis joined me back in 2000, 2001. And we really built the business over a decade. And towards the end of it, as we were helping law firms think about their profitability, we needed to be able to help them to think about not just how to be profitable today, but how to be profitable in the future, which really led to the need to try to get some data on the market, which was either going to be Thompson and the Westlaw data, or it was going to be LexisNexis and some of the Marndale Hubble data back then.

6:28And both of them thought it was a great idea to bring our data set and their data set together, but they didn't want a license to They prefer to engage in a transaction. So we ended up bringing Redwood Analytics into LexisNexis at that point. And now it's part of Adoram. It was a lot of fun working with law firms and working with partners. Yeah. And so you've kind of worked in, you've worked in other verticals. You've also worked in legal adjacent verticals since then. But I'm kind of curious, Redwood Analytics, My perception of it is that it was, I'm not trying to butter you up in this way, but I think it was really kind of ahead of its time in terms of understanding the value to law firms of data analytics at a time when maybe a lot of law firms didn't get that message.

7:17Do you see it that way? Well, Bob, I appreciate the question. I appreciate that. But what was going on was that New York and LA firms were starting to create an escape velocity on the profits per partner. And a lot of markets were starting to think about, so Philadelphia, Houston, Atlanta, Boston, Seattle, Kansas City, we're thinking about how do they get bigger? How do they get more distributed? How do they add practice areas and do that in a way that allowed the firm to continue to operate efficiently, but at the same time to be able to add profits to the firm that were the lifeblood for attracting good talent?

8:04And, you know, Redwood Analytics really brought together the technology that you needed to have in order to be able to do that at scale. But at the same time, sort of the quality of thinking that at the time a Hildebrandt or an Altman Weil would have as a consultancy. And we were able to really, I think, marry a strong services perspective with a strong technology perspective as well. And I think that that right time, right place from an inflection in the industry. And we were really able to harness that to grow ourselves as well. Do you feel that the legal industry has evolved significantly since then?

8:53And if so, how? Yeah. So, first of all, I'm 10 days back into the industry. So, but, you know, I think that there's a lot. about the industry that's very familiar. Firms want to grow. They want to provide great customer service. They want to be able to drive the operational efficiency in their firm. But the market's also changing. All of the access to the law, the information, all of this AI rubric that we put on to things and that infuses the workflows creates an inflection point for people to rethink how their businesses operate, how they practice law and how it goes forward. And it's very familiar to me in that way.

9:40You know, one of the in-between stops was part of a company on the board called Ontelis, which did medical record retrieval for litigation use cases. And a big part of our client base were law firms. And they needed to get access quickly, cost-effectively to the right medical record It needed to have that be highly reliable. And, you know, we were able to, in that business work, to be able to move it more digital from being purely analog services. So I think there's an opportunity to do that. People don't go away in this industry. You gotta be face-to-face with folks, but at the same time, we've gotta be able to bring the efficiency to the table, both for our clients and then ultimately for their clients as well.

10:30So as you say, you're 10 days into it. Um, what brought you back into it? What, what, what did you, what attracted you about SharePoint or about the industry that made you want to come back? Yeah. So I think twofold, one at a personal level, I'm always been fascinated by times of technological innovation, you know, it creates change. You talked about Redwood and, and Redwood being a little bit ahead of its time. We were both ahead of its time, but the databases, the business intelligence tools were just emerging to allow for cost-effective advisory work to be provided in a way that had not been in place before then.

11:10Today, I think you have the same sort of things. I think you have an opportunity to lean into a number of different technologies, clearly the AI, but machine learning in the background to be able to pull insights out of a deep data set and transform that into something that an attorney or a CFO can make actionable in a decision. And so we're at a point in time where the industry's undergoing the change that allows for that innovation. And that's always been something that gets me energized and gets me moving. And you were, Eric Thurston, the prior CEO, is remaining on as executive chairman. I'm curious whether there was something that sort of motivated this change in leadership at this point in time.

11:56What was the reason for the change right now? Yeah, I think Eric really wanted to spend time up to his hip in rivers in Montana and do some good fly fishing at this point. You know, from his meet your tech days all the way through his SurePoint days, you know, he had a lot of time in working in the industry from a couple of different lenses. And this was an opportunity for him to elevate to a strategic perspective and to think about where the industry is headed, but at the same time to hand the baton to team and a set of operators who need to do some real work to bring the right software to the table and to bring the right set of people and services to the table to facilitate what our customers want to be able to do.

12:49So, you know, as Eric started to think about his retirement, we've got a background in it, both from legal industry, but also horizontally. I've seen what works and doesn't work in applying data, in creating insights, and in being able to have your customer take an action from that. And so, you know, I think right time, right place, right people for us here. Yeah. I know, or at least I take it from your LinkedIn profile, that you've also been an advisor to Aqualine, which is a primary investor in SharePoint. And so I'm curious to what extent you were kind of familiar with SharePoint before taking this job and what did you see as kind of its greatest strength and maybe its greatest challenge?

13:37Yeah, so I was a senior advisor and both sat on boards and advised companies that Aqualine owns, as well as the partners that are involved. And so very familiar with how they think about things and their desire to grow businesses and to grow businesses in a strong way. So, you know, I think that power of SurePoint historically was that it was, you know, the original applications and software were built by folks in the industry. We were built by accountants. We were built by attorneys. We had the user's point of view at all levels. And I think one of the things that is critical about law firms is you have to think about the lawyer and the partner and the timekeeper and the COO and the CFO and the back office staff that needs to do it.

14:36And that front office and back office connection and having that be seamless is really, really critical. And I think SharePoint always approached the world as we're the accountant, we're the attorney. me. And I think when you do that, you bring a different sort of emphasis to which functionality to surface and to what the needs are. And, you know, it's a big part, I think, as we go from doing that in our applications today to our new applications that will be coming out and coming down the pike. That's important for us to maintain that heritage of thinking user first. Yeah, it's interesting you raise that because a lot of people listening to this right now may not be aware that the roots of this company go back to 1982 when it was founded as an accounting and financial management software company for law firms, rebranded in 2020, I think it was.

15:36How well has the company, you know, in your perception sort of kept up with the times? I mean, this is one of the oldest legal software companies in some ways, at least it traces its roots back quite a ways back. And yet it is very much embroiled in a very fast changing market. So how does it kind of balance those two sides? Yeah, Bob, you're putting your finger on one of the biggest challenges that I think every technology company working with law firms has, which is how do you keep the technology and what you're doing current and modern so that it can always grow and evolve? And at the same time, the stability and the usability for the attorneys and for the administrative team in law firms can't change too fast.

16:30You've got to find that balance between those two things. And that's going to be different by firm for, you know, very firm-specific reasons. And I think that, you know, we work with firms with 20 attorneys. We work with firms with 350 attorneys. You know, the needs in both of those are very, very different at times. Can be similar. They want profitability. They want growth. They want efficiency. They want firm performance. But at the same time, the number of offices, the number of practice areas, the orientation, those things can be unique to each of those firms. And so I think we have to, our job is to end up with a strong point of view around it, but to also listen really well to our customers in the market about how to evolve.

17:16I don't know what the answer is exactly at a specific level. Maybe you'll invite me back in a year and we can dive into some of those specifics. But balancing that is our job. Figuring that out and finding the right way to do that is what we have to do for our customers. Yeah. Well, yeah. And I'm happy to have you back in a year. I've had a number of these conversations where I'm talking to people who have just stepped into the job. and they're still trying to get their bearings. And I'm asking them all sorts of other questions. But, you know, obviously, I'm sure you had a lot of conversations even considering coming into the job and put a lot of thought into this.

17:58And so, you know, given what you just said, should SharePoint customers view your appointment as sort of a continuation of business as usual? Or is this a mandate for some sort of a change or something different? Yeah, I think there is a mandate. for change here. I think anytime you transition a CEO, you have an opportunity to think about what do our customers need from us over the next year, three years, five years, 10 years. And one of the really critical things when you're as mission critical to the operations and workflows and performance of a firm is we want our customers to know that we're going to be here for another decade, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years.

18:47You know, we are proud of that legacy going back to the 1980s. There are not a lot of systems out there, firm performance systems that can trace a legacy back that far in that we're going to have the right technology for a world that doesn't exist today. And that's challenging. At the same time, the mandate is, in my belief, is that technology alone is not sufficient. What firms really want is they want an ability to make good decisions and drive good outcomes, both in the practice and the business of law. And so we've got to be able to take all of this rich, deep historical data and turn it into actionable insights that somebody can make a decision with and that they can be able to improve a process.

19:41So, you know, we've got all of this information about time entry. So we can help bring tools to timekeeping that improve the capture while reducing the time and effort involved in that time capture. And if we can do that, then we can add value for our customers. And so the mandate's not just about software and technology. It's not just about data intelligence and insights. But as importantly, it's about the people who can help our firms be able to take that forward. And, you know, our customers should expect to see us continue to invest in a bigger, more robust team of people around the table.

20:23It's what we did at Redwood. It was a key lesson from Redwood. And it's something that I believe that we will start to do here in SurePoint in the very near future and continue that forward. Access to that kind of data perhaps takes on even greater significance now than it did back in the Redwood days because of the advent of generative AI technology and the potential that that brings. So how are you looking at generative AI and what's going to change, what's not going to change going forward? Yeah, so you bring up a good point. So when I think about AI, Bob, I think about both machine learning and generative AI.

21:04I think they both have a place here. So when you're mining the history and you need something to be 100 % accurate that's coming off a set of facts, ultimately, you want the machine learning creating that insight. In order for the user to consume it, you want generative AI on top of those insights so that the end user is either seeing it, getting some context, getting some color. And I think it's that balance between reliable output along with that probabilistic generative output to let me consume it better. And we can use generative AI tools to make it easier to get visuals and graphs and trends and cross tabs.

21:55But what matters is what's going in to that grid. And, you know, we found early on that, you know, the concept of leverage, as an example, is one that you have to really be able to parse apart. Is leverage just junior to junior and senior associate type leverage? Or is it geographic leverage? Or is it practice area leverage? Those things need to be based on a set of understanding and business logic that aren't just about the generative AI. They're about a more deterministic approach. And I think we can apply the tools to both of those so that we don't get hallucinations. We don't get things that are off track.

22:39We don't get bad citations. And instead, we have data and output that really can be trusted and relied upon so we don't slow an attorney down as they're operating with their customers or as they're building their practice in their book of business. Yeah. Does that, I mean, I assume in your 10 days and maybe beforehand you've started talking to some of your customers. Is that a message that resonates with them? What are you hearing from them around the use of sort of deterministic versus degenerative types of technology? Yeah, so really early, you know, I am just kicked off a customer tour and, you know, want to talk to five to 10 customers a week and, you know, I'm looking forward to Eltecon to be able to see a lot more of them here in a few weeks.

23:31But, you know, what we're hearing is that some firms have deeply embraced AI, but also have concerns about the fact that what AI was in the tools 12 months ago are different from what it is today. There's the ground still shifting underneath them at a technological level. the business problem doesn't change, the business value doesn't change, but how you deploy it, you've got to be careful to be not too far past the vanguard of that. It's important to maintain that approach. I've also talked to other firms that know they need it, but have different orientation. Maybe they're in a different practice area, different part of law, and they're thinking about it They want to measure twice and cut once type approach.

24:22And I think that everybody knows that the practice and business of law are going to shift around. They know these are tools that are important to have, but they need them to be usable. They need them to be tangible. They can't be too high. And it's very similar to what we found when we saw analytic tools as opposed to reporting tools emerge in the 2000s. that what people thought they were changed over time and the tools themselves changed over time. And I think that we're going to continue to see that on the AI side as well.

25:10I'm speaking with Jeff Steinberg, the new CEO of SharePoint Technologies. Coming up, he tells me the company still has integration work to do after four acquisitions in four years. And he lays out the three things he wants to be judged by a year from now. But first, please take a moment to learn about the sponsors who so generously support Law Next.

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26:58Welcome back to Law Next. I'm Bob Ambroji, and my guest is Jeff Steinberg, who was just recently named CEO of SurePoint Technologies. Before the break, we talked about how he thinks about AI. Now I want to turn to SurePoint's string of acquisitions over the past four years and where the company is on integrating those acquisitions. Let's pick up the conversation there.

27:28Jeff, over the last four years, SharePoint made a number of significant acquisitions. There was Coyote Analytics and ContactEase in 2022, Leopard Solutions in 2024, Zencase in 2025. How well has the company done in sort of integrating these and pulling them all together? And what's left to be done? Yeah. So we need to do more work integrating, Bob. I think that we are private equity backed. So we will always be thinking about logical value added acquisitions for our law firms. Done that in different industries for different private equity groups. But the key is they got to be value added for our customers.

28:11And, you know, thinking about how you integrate software, how you bring additional data to that software, those things are really important. And, you know, so you look at a product like ContactEase, which, by the way, we looked at and potentially and had relationships and partnerships with back in the Redwood days, just like we did with Interaction. What does that mean today? So CRM is a great example of something that I believe is a component, but not part of what law firms need. Law firms really need marketing automation more than pure customer relationship management. that it's about providing value from the partners and the attorneys out to their customer bases, both to create awareness and to help drive additional matters and additional management.

29:05It's leverage for the partners in communicating with their customers. So, you know, we need to think about what that means for that type of product going forward and how that fits into the firm's performance. So we need to do more integration. And I think we need to make sure that we're being thoughtful about how we bring our current stack of technology insights and services to our customer base. And as we do that, then we can figure out the right places to add additional value down the road. And I would, you know, we need to be able to do both. We've got to operate organically every day, though.

29:45Our customers are the lifeblood of the firm. Right. So do you see that kind of evolving toward a sort of a common data layer, common user experience? What's the longer term picture for all of that? Yeah, it's a great question. The way I think about that is that you want to be able to provide a standard set of functionality that's needed according to the user. A timekeeper is a different user than the AR and collections staff. And we need to think about that and we need to be able to have the right level of information and insight and the right level of functionality to map to the user. So some things are standard, but law firms are different.

30:34You know, law firms, you know, I was in a firm in Texas back in the early 2000s, and I asked about, you know, standard approaches. And the executive director at the time said, well, I've got 75 attorneys in the firm. Twenty five of them are building their own books of business. I have to provide a standard shared service, but customized to what each one of those partners is trying to do in their own client base. And that really informed my view on how we tried to build Redwood back in the day and what we're going to try and do in building SharePoint. We've got to have commonality, but we do have to understand that different firms and different partners need flexibility in their workflows to be able to be able to focus in on how they want to operate their practice.

31:27And some firms are a little more decentralized, push out that decision making out to the partner and other firms are a little more centralized in how they operate. And, you know, we've got to be able to work and to provide value to both. So I know it's a little bit of a little bit of best of both worlds kind of answer, but I I think it's critical. I think that's how law firms operate. As partners, we have to be able to meet those needs. And I think that makes sense. In addition to acquisitions, you've also done partnerships. Recently, partnerships with Laurel and Billables AI on automated timekeeping.

32:08How do you kind of view that balance as between whether to acquire, whether to partner, whether to build internally? What's your thinking on that? Yep. Uh, usually when I ask my board that they say yes to all of the above, but, uh, you know, look, we, you know, one of the things that, that I think we did a really nice job of, uh, at Redwood was to find the right partnerships. Um, and, and that's always been an ethic of, of mine. The, the ecosystem in the legal industry is too broad for any one company to do everything all themselves. And so I think about partnership through three lenses. I think about the technology partnerships that we need to have.

32:55I think about the service partnerships that are critical to being able to provide the right support and value to our customers. And then I think about data partnerships to be able to bring information into the environment in a way that create those insights and allow you to go forward in making better business decisions inside the firm. So whether that's a commercial partnership or it's an integrated partnership is form that's really driven by sometimes by what the selling shareholder wants and what they look like. Sometimes it's driven by how close do we need to get together? How important is it to really deeply integrate as opposed to being able to have good, strong relationships and have like APIs that move data back and forth?

33:55And so I think you have to go through that. And a lot of times relationships evolve. They can start on the commercial side and develop over time into integrations and bringing businesses together. So, you know, I think we'll continue to have, we have a strong partner network today. I've been talking with a number of them over the course of the last couple of weeks and we'll continue to have that. And, you know, we'll see how that grows and develops and evolves over time. We tend to think of the legal market in terms of small firms, mid-sized firms and large firms. And maybe that's not a very accurate description, but SharePoint certainly focuses on that mid part of the market.

34:39And to me, that's been one of the more interesting parts of the market over the last couple of years. I think that's become much more competitive than it was even maybe just five years ago, certainly 10 years ago. I wonder what you see as SharePoint's differentiator in that market. What really makes you stand out? Yeah. So to that segment of the market is both, has pressure both from above in the way that larger full service firms can spread acquisition costs, marketing costs, training costs, recruiting costs, and, you know, in the field, but they're also under pressure below with the firms that can be really focused and nimble.

35:23So in there, we've got to help them and their firm performance. We've got to be able to help them operate really, really efficiently at a price point that gives them just as good, if not better, unit costs than large firms so that they can put their resources behind what they do for clients. And we've got to be able to give them visibility to the insights and the information that they need to both grow their firm and to do that profitably. So, you know, as we think about firm performance, we think about how you marry what's going on in front of the attorney, the partner and the customer of the firm, and then how that flows seamlessly to the administrative team.

36:13And I think that there's complexity above what a small firm can have, but you don't need all of the, you know, multi-currency type functionality, perhaps, that a really large law firm needs to have. and we can keep that focused in order to help them drive firm performance. And we can really take, hopefully, the experience that we've had over the last several decades and translate it into an ongoing sort of flow for them in how they think about their business and how they practice law. Sure points. All research has identified trends in that market relating to increasing consolidation, adoption, kind of lateral mobility, accelerating AI adoption.

37:01Do you see one or any of those trends having, you know, most likely to have a major impact on that market over the next couple of years? Well, I think AI is currently... Or is that an all of the above? Yeah. I mean, look, I think AI is going to transform how all businesses operate and how, you know, when I was young, I was a staff bookkeeper in an entrepreneurial business, my dad's business, that was shifting from paper accounting to computerized accounting. And, you know, so technology is going to continue to move forward. It's going to continue to advance and we're going to be able to adopt it to drive efficiency, you know, rinse, repeat, polish it and keep going.

37:45I think these trends around consolidation and lateral movement, I think it's interesting. Those were the same trends that I was being asked about when I was on a panel at ILTA back in 2006, 2007. seven, the beauty of law is that we're still going to have a system of rules that need to be adjudicated and negotiated in different ways. So the practice of law never goes away. How we practice law may change. How firms shape themselves. So one of the things that happened was the departmental view of a law firm shifting into a practice view of a law firm so that we're not just groups of attorneys, but we're groups of matter types and customer types.

38:40So I think the economy and the approach is vibrant. I think that, you know, I kind of expected the middle, like a lot of industries, to get hollowed a little bit, to be pressured from the above and below. So, and I think what we've seen is that the legal industry and law firms are resilient and their strategies in that middle segment that really push back on what customers want from their law firms and how lawyers want to practice and what they want to focus on and spend their day. And it's a really vibrant ecosystem of firms and clients and needs. So, yes, we're going to see the change. The change will always be there.

39:26But I think about it as evolution as opposed to a real dichotomy. And that evolution occurs in different paces and different ways. And, you know, our jobs to be there and provide solutions for each of those different segments. You mentioned coming back on the show in a year, and I'll take you up on that. But if you do that, what are the two or three kind of priorities that you've set for yourself for this first year that customers might want to look a year out from now and say, yeah, he did that or he didn't do that? Yeah. So it's a great question. Three things. Super simply. I really want to talk to customers, not just our customers, but law firms.

40:12And when I say that, it's the partner of a firm. It's the COO. It's the CFO. It's the attorneys. You know, talking to customers to really understand how they view the evolution of the business. How fast do they want to progress? Because a lot of times technology companies fail because they get out in front of their customer. And finding that right balance. So, you know, hopefully I'll be more articulate around the needs that they have and what they see. So that's number one. Number two is our product stack and how we think about our product and how we think about the balance between providing a really stable 10 to 20 year runway for somebody's firm performance software.

41:07Because people, once you go through the pain of changing, you don't want to have to change again. This needs to be long, useful life to these tools. So how does our product need to meet that long-term stability need and at the same time be able to move forward quickly with areas that are evolving? and you know I sort of talk about it internally as you know conflict checking is not going to change debit and credit entry is not going to change the insights that we need about our customers or prospective clients or our attorneys that are in our firm those insights those are going to change and those are going to evolve really fast so how do we create stability whilst at the same time having agility to be able to evolve the platform as the need.

42:00So number one, the customers and clients and their needs. Number two, how the product balances those needs going forward. And then the third is how do we bring a vibrant ecosystem of service partners and technology partners to our clients in the right way and build out our own services in a way that allows us to execute on what their need is and how our product meets their need. So if the technology is great, if the insights are great, but we can't help them get to that knowledge in a seamless fashion and understand it and use it, then we're not doing our jobs. And that's about people. At the end of the day, law firms are all about people.

42:48the people that they work for in their clients and the people that work inside the firm as well. And we have to be able to map to all of that human infrastructure that I think is so characteristic of the law firm and so critical for the law firm. Well, you mentioned a second ago that you hope to be more articulate about some of this in a year from now, but you've been quite articulate about it in this interview. So I really appreciate your taking the time. I've been asking you a lot of questions. Is there anything else that you want to say before we wrap up about your coming aboard or about SurePoint?

43:24Yeah, no, look, Bob, I appreciate that. First, I'm super excited to be back in the industry. I've described it to people like having missed a whole bunch of reunions at my college and coming back and all of the hangouts are different. The restaurants have turned over, the shops have turned over, but the people are still there. You know, and when I think about folks who started at Redwood as financial analysts who are now chief operating officers of firms or people that founded the business with me that have now gone on to really significant, high profile roles, it's really heartwarming for me to see that and come back and feel it as really familiar.

44:13So I'm just super excited to be back in and to be learning about where the industry is today. And, you know, SharePoint, I think the challenges, you know, that every company has when it has a long life and it's done some acquisitions is that you've got to have an opportunity to step back and think about where do we really need to be three years, five years from now on behalf of our customers. And that's a really interesting opportunity for me because it requires a lot of conversation with the folks that are living this every day and then translating it back into something that actually provides value.

44:57And, you know, we were really gratified back at Redwood about the client satisfaction scores that Lexus got when they did their diligence on us. And it was a testament to the trusted relationship that Redwood had with its customers, which was as much about the customers and who we knew being willing to have that kind of relationship with us. And that's a great opportunity for us to continue to take SharePoint and be able to take it forward and be able to really lean in more to how we work with our customer base. So I'm just, it should be a lot of fun, a lot of hard work, but, you know, that's part of the joy of building businesses.

45:45Well, I'm adding an entry to my calendar as soon as we get off of this call to check back with you in a year. but congratulations on this new role. And I really appreciate your taking the time to come on the show and talk about it. Absolutely, Bob. Look, I really appreciate this opportunity two weeks in and enjoying all of it and this nice opportunity for us to chat and to also talk to the audience. So really appreciate your time. All right. Thanks, Bob. Appreciate it.

46:21Thanks for joining us for today's show. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to share your own thoughts or comments, please do so by messaging us on LinkedIn or other social media, or just email me directly, ambroji at gmail.com. If you're a fan of the show, please leave us a review. Law Next is a production of Law Next Media. I'm your host, Bob Ambroji. I hope you'll join us again next time for another episode of Law Next.

46:50Thank you.