The Junior Work Is Going: Roch Glowacki on AI, Making Partner & Legal Careers Strategy - S10E20

0:00The junior work is going. There's lots of people that go into the profession and say, I want the status, I want ego, I want money or whatever. And these are not unfortunately the right reasons. It's only when I joined Lewis Silken thinking this is potentially on the cards, but I wasn't entirely sure that I want to make part and I really spent time thinking why. There are challenges with the EUSAI and that's where you get to the impact. For a lot of them specifically, obviously this area has now become almost a standalone area of practice, right? I don't think two, three, four years ago, even when TGPD came out, you would think it's so multidisciplinary that you end up needing to work with your employment colleagues, data protection colleagues, commercial teams, all in tandem.

0:42That's where the real value is. On today's Legally Speaking podcast, I'm delighted to be joined by Rock Glavatsky. Rock is a partner in the digital commerce creative team at Lewis Silken. He specializes in AI, emerging technologies, software solutions, digital media, and e-commerce issues. Recognized as a key lawyer in the Legal 500 in AI, commercial contracts, and TMT, Rock is passionate about the evolving regulatory landscape of big data and AI. So a very big warm welcome to the show, Rock. Thanks very much, Rob. I mean, I know we've spoken about this for a number of years now, so it's really, and we've been observing each other's journey for a while.

1:21So I am, yeah, I'm delighted to be here. Oh, it's an absolute pleasure to finally have you on the show. And yes, all good things come to those who wait. And you've had an incredible career up to date, which we're going to talk all about today. But before we do that, a couple of icebreaker questions. What's your favorite beverage and your preferred choice of footwear on a typical workday? I'll have to go back to my Polish roots and promote Poland tangentially. So there's this cocktail that's called apple pie. and the reason why i think i think well one is super good because it's based you have zubrówka which is famous polish vodka on uh with apple juice on ice and you put a bit of cinnamon on top of it um and a fun fact i i've introduced the dj from rudimental to to this drink uh once it's a long story but anyway and he posted about it on his instagram so that's a tiny little funny fun fact but it's a really nice drink i recommend the cocktail very simple to make and very lovely shoes um i am going to reveal another bias i have i said reveal the polish bias if you know any if you have any dancer friends i love puma um suede shoes and that's because i used to dance in them all the time so i wear them a lot um and yeah dancers are very particular about the shoes um so yeah that's probably my favorite one you'll see and you'll probably see me in the office in those as well.

2:46Two Ps, Polish booze and pumas. We're with you. I'm with you. Okay, that's fascinating. Thanks for sharing, but we must talk about you. So to begin with, Rock, would you mind telling our listeners a bit about your background and career journey? Yeah, so as I've sort of alluded to it, I came from Poland. I grew up in Poland. I did my international baccalaureate there and applied for universities abroad and I got into King's College to study law with an exchange program in the netherlands in leiden and during that exchange i sort of was applying for all these different training contracts got into uh reed smith a u.s firm and i qualified there into uh an entertainment and media practice um and that's really where i think you know sort of the sort of key milestones of my career started because i ended up doing quite a lot of secondments so i was at bower media which um to those sort of listening uh but not necessarily knowing the brand it's a company it's a group that owns absolute radio kiss magic a bunch of magazines um across across europe uh grazia empire so it's a very big media group uh so i was there uh i was at itv which is super fun and then i ended up at amazon web services which really was the sort of key uh turning point in my career because at the time and that this is now sort of eight eight and eight and a half years ago i was on secondment there and he had lots of companies putting data in the cloud and saying look aws and our cloud providers we're putting data in the cloud we don't know what to do with it can you give us your data scientists and software engineers to figure out patterns of that data and i was the lawyer dealing with these sort of professional services contracts where you essentially uh the the the client was providing all these data scientists software engineers and detecting patterns in the data and that was really early well early ai has been for a while but that was for me that was my first um uh inroad into working on these machine related and machine learning related projects and my first contact with ai when actually in the legal profession not many people um had any sort of um any points of intersection with this area so that really put me on a much more sort of tech focused journey i was like this is really cool there's something happening here.

5:03And I decided I went to during the pandemic, I ended up going to Linklater's TMT practice, because I thought I really want to pivot towards technology, do complex technology transactions, app skill technically. So Lynx came up and I sort of took that role. And then moved from Lynx to find my sort of sweet home at Lewis Silken, which was really about as chat gpt came out and sort of it sparked everyone's imagination what ai could do i was like i need to move to be somewhere where i can both support startups both support big companies at the beginning companies are going to be dipping their toes in ai unfortunately as great links was in a lot of respects it's not going to do some of the sort of um cutting edge ai work coming from startup scale ups uh so i thought i need to move and lewis Silken was a great blend for me to build on that entertainment and sort of creative industry practice, but also combine it with that very technical, typical TMT skill set.

6:01So sort of that's how I ended up at Lewis Silken. And such a well thought out career journey and hugely successful and strategic in all of your moves, hence, you know, all the success that you've had. So let's stick with the current day then, because you've recently made partner at the firm. Huge, huge congratulations you know Lewis Silken has only has equity partnerships so it's a big deal because I know all the partners get to vote on it so could you tell us how that actually felt being made partner so it's it's it's still sinking in you know I was speaking to another partner the other day and he was he told me that it took him half a year until he went for like a weekend strategy sort of um you know strategy weekend with other partners that he was like oh oh gosh, I'm a partner.

6:45So I think it's going to take time to sink in. So you'll get probably a slightly unfiltered and fresh reaction, hopefully. So there's two things. One, as you say, there's a sort of degree of, you know, I feel validated in a way because my career choices and then the way I went about them, as you've actually pointed out, there was a strategy in it. And when optically for some people, my choices seemed a bit strange. I started with Reed Smith, which didn't have the biggest brand in the UK. It's a big US firm, amazing and same in media practice. But my colleagues were like, you have offers from the other place.

7:21And I had other offers. But I went with Reed Smith because I was like, they have focused on secondments. They have small training intake and they had the MA course. So they were one of the very few law firms at the time that had the legal practice with business course. So that was purely about growth and sort of pursuing these opportunities. Linglaters, again, people were like, why are you moving from Reed Smith to Linglaters? This is very moving from media to like these big M &A transactions, big outsourcing deals. What's going on here? So I felt validated because all these choice, these career moves were very strategic on my part, but optically they seemed weird for people.

7:54And even when I moved to Louis Silicon, I had comments from partners saying from sort of previous lives, so to speak, saying, well, why are you moving to Louis Silicon? I thought you're always going to be at this big, big, big city law firm like Link's or Reed Smith. So I felt validated. The other thing that is, I think, interesting or sort of my thinking, it's interesting to observe my own thinking over the past nine months or a year, really, more than that. When you start thinking about partnership and you start preparing for it, and now when you're a partner, your thinking very much switches from me as an individual to me as a team, me as the firm.

8:30for me it was quite an interesting sort of process and it takes the time the whole process obviously takes time that you know when you're an associate you're thinking about your billable target and you're like how do i hit my target what do i do and it's me me me unfortunately but that's just that that's just the nature that you've got to hit your target or you sort of aim to hit your target as you start thinking about your business plan and how do you fit within the team how are you going to build the practice how are you going how does this fit with the broader a firm strategy, you start thinking, gosh, what do I need to do within the team?

8:59How do I retain the talent within the team? How do I attract? How am I a good example that people want to work with me? How do I, what are the different business levers within the firm to pull that my business case and the abilities that I bring? How can I influence that? So you start thinking much broadly and I must say it takes a while and I think rightly almost the partnership process is it takes a while because over that course of that process my thinking was evolving and now i started thinking about the firm as a firm not just me being like i need to hit my targets or whatever i'm thinking how do i make my colleagues um juniors and other partners sort of perform as well so it's a um it's an interesting i think it requires quite a shift in your mindset and that that that shift takes a bit of time takes a bit of thinking but i'm really excited about it because as i say there's other levers in the business to pull.

9:53And so the partnership opens that for opportunity. Absolutely. And huge congratulations once again, and separately, not directly linked to your partnership, but around the same time, you also received a gift, didn't you, from the Vice Minister of Finance in the Lithuanian government. So tell us about that quick story. I think we owe our listeners probably a little bit of context of explaining. Yeah, absolutely. Because what happened, basically, the day after I got the call from the partners saying the voters come through, you're going to be made up. The day after, we at the Polish City Club were hosting Fat Thursday, which is a sort of traditional celebration.

10:29It's the last Thursday before Lent. People have lots of donuts and eat compulsively lots of food. And we have our ex-board member, Janusz Kisnewicz, who is Lithuanian-Polish.

10:46he got poached by the, sort of recruited by the Lithuanian government last year to be their Vice Minister of Finance, which is just incredible story within the Polish community. But he's also an incredible advocate for the club. And he always, even in his busy governmental role, he came over to the dinner and to sort of be with us and support the community. And he gave me a little gift which was just really sort of nice and it's a tie with the Polish ego on it and it's just if Poland and Lithuania have a very sort of historical bond it used to be a union and so Poles and Lithuanians are very very close culturally and it's just amazing he's one of those individuals that he's hugely personable hugely the intellectual rigor and the effort he puts into the community is just incredible so it was and it just it was just coincidence that the event was the next day and they were the only the board of the Polish City Club were the first ones to find out actually that I'm being made up so it's a it was a nice yeah it was unrelated but related in a way and I said I took a picture of this and I sent it to you so yeah absolutely that's what I wanted our listeners to know I thought it was a beautiful story and yeah links very nicely to all the success and all the great things that you have achieved and indeed deserve so you've talked a bit about your story people are gonna be like how have you done it so what tips could you give to lawyers because you've had rapid career progression to partnership what tips would you give to lawyers looking to make partner from your experience reflecting on your recent success it's funny because i when i started as a i remember doing my lpc during my training contract there was a lot of people around me that sort of went into their legal career and they seemed to be very clear they want to make partner and the reality is not not many people actually proportionally that there's not that many people that can make partner that's not that that's that it just doesn't work that way uh for for lots of different reasons right but i didn't i didn't really think that way i mean i i was just happy i mean coming from poland for me the the trainee salaries when i looked at them i was like this is incredible this is this is crazy money uh that's how i felt right i mean obviously when you think about the cost of living and everything else um it's not crazy but anyway coming from poland i i didn't really think that far and i just wanted to be good at what i did um so my my choices were driven by uh personal growth uh goals and the idea that i just want to be better and i want to i want to be better what i do or the best at what i do and have an interesting career so um when people think oh how did you do it i want to be partner as well i think the first thing they got to ask themselves is why because there's lots of people that go into the profession and that's the reason why they then leave because they go into the profession and say i want the status i want ego i want money or whatever and these are not unfortunately the right reasons and i had to be honest i is only when i joined lewis silken i joined thinking this is potentially on the cards but i wasn't entirely sure that i want to make partner and I really spent time thinking why and and when I when I got my answer that when I what that's when I really sort of pushed for it and sort of applied went for the process and my why was that actually there is a ceiling to what I can do in my role and there's a ceiling to my growth and actually going and coming into the partnership becoming a corner in the business it actually puts me on a different platform that look my my thinking has already shifted this this just the process itself had an impact on my sort of outlook on how I look at the firm but I'm super excited about being able to pull the different levers within the business on what we do you know we've rolled out a SaaS product last year on the employment side we were you know we've adopted Harvey as I think what the first UK not nation big national UK firm we're the first one to sort of adopt Harvey and roll it out so there's this there's there's ways that I'm involved in terms of rolling out things within the firm and how do we make the most use.

14:49So I thought actually in terms of my growth, how do I manage a team? How do I supervise people? I thought this is going to be another layer of growth for me and that's why I wanted to do it. Not the other reasons that I've mentioned which I think are sometimes the wrong drivers for people. And then the other, I guess the other, so the why is I think the first thing. Why do you want to be a partner? Because if you want to be for money ego status i think you might want to look at other careers actually you're probably going to make more money at some other places um so that's one thing uh the other thing is i think just invest in yourself i i felt um it came up in my partnership um uh sort of interviewing with the board uh that the feel of my business case and the feel of sort of the skills that i've built It's like I'm this startup that has been in stealth mode for a while and I'm now sort of going to IPO or something like that.

15:48That's a sort of analogy that someone drew because I've always looked at my career holistically and trying to invest and doing the hard things, the things that didn't quite seem right for people around me, but sort of people were like, why are you doing that? It doesn't make sense to them. But I was like, let me lean into this. No one really wants to do it. to be honest and I don't think many sane people wanted to would necessarily want to go from Reed Smith to Lingleaders because it was a very different work profile and it was hard I didn't do big M &A transactions I didn't there was quite a difference between the firms in terms of in terms of the work profile but I was like I really need to put myself outside of the comfort zone and I did that consistently and I think if you invest in yourself and pursue your passions or we can get to passion separately, I think you cannot go wrong with that, right?

16:37If you keep investing in yourself because there are, yeah, there are sort of, the way I look at is there are three types of capital, social, intellectual, and financial. And the financial can go up and down. You might make a lot of money, you might lose. The social also changes depending who you sort of interact, but the intellectual capital always stays, like what the skills that you've built they are there um so that's why i've sort of uh put a lot of my eggs in one basket in that in that way yeah and it's paid off and i love that you talk about comfort zones you know the comfort zone is great but nothing ever grows there right and you've been particularly strategic you've you know chose the hard as well you know which i think is great you know when certain people have an opinion it's know your own race and run it at your own pace and actually lean into things and you know as a result of that you know you've hit huge success very quickly within your legal career.

17:25So thanks for sharing so many nuggets. And I like that analogy you just pulled there as well around the sort of social, intellectual and financial capital side of things. Okay, let's lean a little bit deeper because you've had a very intentional career, which is what I love. And you now specialize at Lewis Silken in several areas, you know, AI, commercial tech, IP, media, and entertainment. You talked about your career journey and building up that skill stack along the way as well. What type of work are you typically involved in? Give us a bit of a day in the life? I am predominantly a technology lawyer with focus on AI and because of my background from entertainment and media practice there are interesting areas where the sort of creative industry interplays with technology.

18:09You might have a music startup that is procuring sound recordings to train their algorithm to detect what emotions this music for example, triggers. So there's this interesting interplay between the areas. But my work falls within probably four buckets, I'd say. There are probably four dimensions to it. There's a lot of contractual work, and that might be software agreements, licensing of IP, sort of joint ventures, and IT outsourcing. So there's a contractual element. There is a regulatory advisory element. So I might be advising on the EU's AI Act, the classification, What is high risk? What isn't?

18:47It might be advising on IP issues. So just the other day I had queries about data scraping and sort of how it interplays with all the different IP rights. And data scraping has been sort of a known activity to build a lot of different tools and has been going on for decades, really, for a long, long time. And it often involves infringing IP rights. But the risk profile of data scraping has really changed in the previous years. partly with gen ai sort of sparking the imagination all right if all the data is scraped we can build all these things so there's an advisory element to it there's also a um mna um context where you know our client might be investing or buying a technology company and you're speaking about like uh there's a probably i'll be supervising juniors on on the due diligence and advising on the sort of strategic risks in buying this particular company or maybe where the value of the ip is And there's a final, I think the fourth bucket is probably the broader AI governance, which in the absence of the fully crystallized AI regulatory landscape, you're in a situation where clients are thinking, well, actually, fine, the legal landscape is still taking shape, but we still need to be a responsible actor in this AI environment.

20:02So how do we do that? And then you get into the AI governance policies and a whole lot of sort of ancillary pieces of advice which are which sort of border some of the legal considerations and ethical considerations so it's fair to say varied interesting and and very very exciting and you're very much at the cutting edge of trends and ai and where things are going it's not been easy though i can imagine you know you mentioned you know you come from poland you've had that journey abroad you know coming over here what have been some of the challenges you've faced breaking into the legal industry and how have you been able to overcome them i expect my thoughts on this well some of it is it's not going to be unique to you know coming from from abroad and being a non-native speaker otherwise i expect some of the some of the non-native english speakers or those coming from abroad will um resonate with with some of the points i might make um but you know breaking the legal profession whether you're coming from abroad or not there are often there's the sort of social economic elements, right?

21:08I mean, my, so my parents, my family in Poland, my dad is an IT engineer, my mom is an artist. So I didn't have the legal background. I didn't, and I never was in London. I didn't have the legal background, nor was I ever to London before coming here for university. So that was, that's one challenge that's quite common for a lot of people, right? If you're not, if you don't know anyone in the legal profession, it becomes slightly confusing and harder to know what to do. Although I must say, I actually feel very privileged that I did my law in the UK because I think actually the connections that I would have needed in Poland would have been probably even more important and not having them would have been a bigger, bigger blocker.

21:45Whereas I felt that coming to London, I based on my competencies, I actually was able, if I was good, I would perform. So there was that. There's a financial component. I think that's probably, again, that might be, that's going to be a similar for a lot of people, potentially exaggerated when you're coming from abroad. know my i'm hugely grateful to my parents but they've they've they've mortgaged our flats back in poland so i could uh go to university and and stay in london i came still before uh before the tuition fees got like tripled or quadrupled so i still had a pretty decent deal but it required that we my parents had to mortgage mortgage our place and i uh and i and i wanted to get into a job afterwards that i could help them repay that so that was an important thing there's a culture And then there's, I think that's where the non-natives will particularly feel this.

22:33There's this cultural sort of linguistic element to it. And look, I did international baccalaureate. I could read in English. I could speak, but I never really practiced it with like natives, not much practicing. So you come to the UK and you get into these conversations where they're like, oh, you're a law student. And I was at the time, so you're Polish and you're a law student. and you oh and your english is so good uh and you start sort of doubting yourself in a lot of ways because you have this i came to the uk where the stereotype was you had poles working on construction sites working as planners and so it did feel confusing for some people that you have someone who's doing law and they speak really good english or my english improved sort of exponentially as i as i was practicing it and you get into this weird situation sometimes where you know I remember um I was working with a senior lawyer and she sort of picked on something in the in this document on this M &A deal and she said oh I know that you're um I know that you're not a native English speaker uh but this I think is should be spelled differently and the funny thing was that it wasn't me who misspelled it or wrote it in a weird way it was a native English speaker who was the head of the M &A team at the client and they did this and I felt I I'm too junior to make this change but you have you run into these things and there's this thing that happens um that you when you get picked up on oh your english is so good or you get keep getting reminded um there's this psychological phenomena which i'm hugely into psychology so that's why i sort of um mention it i think it's called stereotype threat or stereotype fretting where you hear the stereotype and it reminds you and it almost makes you if you hear like oh your english is so good, your English will deteriorate because you're going to become very self-conscious about this.

24:29And that has happened a number of times in my career. So you feel like when you combine these factors, you feel like, gosh, I'm not in the legal profession. I don't have the same money. When I came to the UK, I remember all these different societies. And I was like, I cannot pay membership for the wine society, the bar society, and the law society because I cannot afford this. So I feel worse financially. I shouldn't be here. And then you have these cultural barriers uh barriers are sort of friction points maybe barriers are the wrong word so you feel worse i think that's that's what i what i when i now do mentoring when i speak um to colleagues non-natives particularly and my colleagues who have built professional careers over the past years and we're that generation of poles that came here and built careers in medicine finance law consulting entrepreneurship a lot of us felt at the time that we're just wars that we're secondary in that way.

25:20And I think that's, I'd love to say that there's an easy answer to it. I sort of, um, looking in retrospect, because I don't know whether I did it consciously back then, all these factors I've mentioned are sort of external variables, call them for me, because I've just throughout my childhood, teenage years, I've sort of been primed or primed myself to to look at personal growth and wanting to have these holistic, to building these skill sets to being, you're good at school, you perceive as a nerd, but I wanted to be good at sports to counterbalance that. I am actually, traditionally, I'm quite an introverted person, but I've pushed myself to be outside of those comfort zones.

26:03So when I focus on these internal skills and when I focus on doing all these activities outside of my school, university, I started focusing on my internal variables of internal factors or skill sets that they don't fully resolve the external factors, but they act as a counterbalance that you have something else to focus on because it's very easy. And look, the first couple of years, particularly I think at university, I felt I don't have enough money, I don't have the contacts. And I feel like an outsider, even in a very international university. I feel a bit outsider that, and outsider along all the other international students in a way back then.

26:45I feel like, how am I going to crack this? And it really, all the other things I was doing in my life that sort of kept me going and helped me build on all these different skill sets that are now actually super useful as a partner, I'd like to think. But I cannot say that I've done it always consciously. I think there was an element of lack or maybe self-preservation or a bit of some consciousness that was like, you've got to do these things because you cannot do the other things. So that's sort of my thoughts on it. Today's Legally Speaking podcast episode is proudly sponsored by Clio. If your legal management software feels more frustrating than helpful, you're not alone.

27:24Many solicitors across the UK delay switching because moving client and case data sounds like a headache. Clio makes it simple. As the intelligent legal work platform, Clio combines context-aware AI with trusted legal research to power your practice. And when you switch, their dedicated migrations team supports you every step of the way, ensuring a smooth transfer of your data. You'll also get award-winning support 24-5 via live chat, phone, and email. So help is always there when you need it. Ready to leave frustration behind? Visit clio.com forward slash UK to learn more and discover why so many UK solicitors choose Clio.

28:08Now back to the show. You have been resilient as well. And I think you've also overcome the challenges, as you say, you have been incredibly driven. And I get that because I've known you for many, many years. But like you say, it's not always easy. And actually, sometimes coming on a podcast and reflecting on some of those things. It is subconscious, a lot of those things that you've done, but I think it's in your nature and who you are that you've gone on to have the successes. And, you know, coming from humble beginnings, I think it's inspiring. So thank you for sharing that. We must talk about AI because you know a thing or two about that, and it's moving incredibly fast.

28:40And from your perspective, what are the legal and regulatory risks law firms should be thinking about when adopting AI solutions? Always happy to chat about AI. I think when you think, when I think about adoption of ai and when i think about the issues there's obviously there's the purely regulatory you know do not put your clients confidential information into the free version of chat gpt for example right there's yeah the confidentiality and regulatory issues but what i purely because of my um involvement in in this space i obviously advise clients but we've deployed harvey um as a firm we've rolled it out last year january to the whole firm and before that in the year before i've been involved in a number of pilots across the firm uh to deploy to deploy the technology choose which vendor we're going to work with and test what actually works for us and so my reflections which i think the key for the adoption challenges that law firms face fall into these sort of three buckets there's the technical behavioral and organizational and i'm really um i'm speaking to those because this is just sort of my first hand experience and that's how I sort of structure my thinking around them.

29:51But you have the technical issues where you have a lot of data in an unstructured way sitting in the partner's head, sitting in document management systems, sitting in all these different places on email and attachments where law firms have in tradition, yes, we have different document management, case management systems, but they are, they don't always interact in the way you'd want it and always may not interoperate. And just the processes, you know, there's a lot of data accumulated in law firms over decades, but it's not particularly well structured, labeled. And that's a big technical challenge.

30:30And, you know, a 200-page outsourcing agreement, I doubt the ChatGPTs or Harvey's or Gemini's of this world are trained on any of those documents because they're not really in the public domain, but they are sitting locked away the sort of fortresses of law firms but there's a technical challenge to to get access to that data there's a there's a behavioral challenge which i find fascinating against sort of my obsession with psychology in a way where these roll out of these tools means that at the moment putting a science a big technology technological leap into agi and so on at the moment the way these tools work is our jobs as lawyers consist of tasks A to Z, let's call it that way.

31:15And the tool is really good at doing tasks C, F, and Y in that sequencing, which means you have to do A and B in your normal way, do C with the tool, and then go back into your normal workflow and continue from then onwards, which is really challenging because it means you have to change people's habits, right and changing people habits is super hard so that's something that preoccupies my mind a lot in terms of changing my own habits but those of my colleagues and that leads into the organizational challenge where it's all very well to say now we have harvey or the equivalent or within the firm use it that's all very well but there's this organizational challenge how do you collect the the best use cases, how do you disseminate them and how do you keep people engaged using the tool on a continuing basis?

32:08So these are challenges that, in a way, I'm excited that as a partner, I'm hoping to sort of grapple with that a bit more and play around with these issues. But I actually think the regulators, and it will vary between jurisdictions and it will or vary law firms between sectors as well. The tools are here, we're gonna be using them. But the challenge for me are these sort of three buckets, technical, behavioral, and organizational. And the fact that the sort of innovation doesn't equal adoption, right? The capabilities are incredible now, but actually the adoption is super slow, super challenging.

32:47And I see that across also, I'm speaking about law firm, but I see that more broadly when I advise clients, I do a lot of contracts which deal with procurement, for example, of AI tools. And I see what, you know, there's one narrative that's in the press about all these tools doing all these agentic things. And then I see the hard reality of what the client is actually buying under the contract and what is the service scope of this tool and, you know, how, what they're actually procuring. And, you know, there's quite a bit of a disconnect because the adoption is slow and it takes time. Yeah, that's sort of my thoughts on the adoption challenges.

33:19But it's a fun, is certainly a fun and interesting space to be in and being able to play with that internally within the business. I love how you put that into the three buckets there and you're right because you know nothing changes if nothing changes but actually getting people on the bus educating them seeing the value in it I always say what's everyone's favorite radio station WIFM in terms of what's in it for me and I think them understanding actually if you were to adopt this technology this is going to save you this time where it's going to make this x y and z so it's a challenge but i think it's very exciting and you're touching on there i just want to go a little bit deeper in terms of just you know your future thoughts on the role of ai and automation playing in the future of legal services and how that might change well there's one thing that goes without saying and i'm sure a lot of people speak about that is that the junior walk is going that's there's no doubt that the you know the stuff that i was delegated when i was a trainee a partner printing out an email and redlining it and me making these changes, that's gone.

34:20The trainee profiting an email, that's gone. A trainee doing initial research, that's gone. A lot of the time, I remember sitting down, getting a task from a partner who was doing a presentation. I would spend an entire day researching what he's going to say in that presentation or preparing, helping him prepare for the call. The reality is I probably, for these tasks i do research through through you know deep research functions on harvey or equivalent um where i can prepare for a call quicker and yes it doesn't do the job perfectly but it is it is it is quicker and i can skim through for the things that are relevant to me in the same way as i would if a trainee collated that together that's happening that that's very very clear now there is a debate i think um what does it mean for the model uh of the firms in the future because Traditionally, we think about this sort of traditional pyramid, lots of juniors, then it starts getting a bit narrower as you get to the top and you get to the partners.

35:19And I think there's two schools of thought around it. One is the hourglass, right? So you have still a reasonable amount of juniors and they get, they very quickly, very few people in the middle, maybe sort of some solution architects, engineers that help you sort of deal with the technology, actually, you know, code and do software engineering around the tools, but these juniors actually can get very quickly by augmentation of, with the augmentation of technology, they move from the bottom of the hourglass to the top of the hourglass and is basically quite even, but they get, juniors get quite senior quite quickly because they are augmented by the technology and they can make, they can make the judgments much easier, much quicker.

35:59So that's one, one view that I'm sure some of the listeners have heard. The other view you is, and I think there's still a debate about it, is actually that you have a diamond shape style of a law firm. So actually, you still need a few people at the top, very senior that can give you an overall direction and steer and they have probably more experience than the AI still will have even if it's been trained on all these different things because they understand the nuances of the particular case a bit more. They don't average it out in the same way as AI might. So you have a few people at the top.