Litigation at a Crossroads: Talent, Tech and Tomorrow’s Teams

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer:

Welcome to The Legal Report from Robert Half where industry leading experts discuss current hiring and practice management issues impacting the legal profession. Robert Half is a premier provider of talent solutions for the legal field. The Legal Report from Robert Half is here on the Legal Talk Network.

Jamy Sullivan:

Hello everyone and welcome. I’m your host, Jamy Sullivan, executive director of the Legal Practice Group for Robert Half. I’m sure our listeners can agree. Litigation is evolving at a rapid pace with the rise of artificial intelligence, legal technology, and shifting expectations in the workplace. Litigation teams are being asked to adapt real time. Traditional roles are being redefined, workflows are being reimagined, and the need for legal professionals who are both tech savvy and strategically minded has never been greater. The question is, how do legal departments and law firms build how performing litigation teams in this fast changing environment and what does it take to attract and retain the right talent while staying ahead of the curve? Joining me today to explore this transformation is someone who’s seen it all from every angle. Aaron Bath, US Vice President of litigation support and legal operations at Balfour Beatty, us with more than 25 years of litigation experience and over 120 trials under his belt. Aaron is a seasoned expert at the intersection of law, operations and technology. He also shares his knowledge as an adjunct professor at Southern Methodist University where he teaches courses in legal technology, e-discovery, and the use of AI in law. Aaron, I know we go way back and it really is such a pleasure to have our relationship come full circle and have you as a guest on our show today.

Aaron Bath:

Absolutely. It’s my pleasure to be here. I appreciated you reaching out. It’s great to reconnect. You are instrumental in my transition into in-house legal position, so it’s really good to be here with you today.

Jamy Sullivan:

Well, you’re too kind. I know you’re very busy. You’ve got a lot on your plate, so I appreciate you taking the time.

Aaron Bath:

Of course. My pleasure.

Jamy Sullivan:

Well, let’s dive in. There’s been a surge in litigation cases lately and legal teams are definitely feeling the impact. Aaron, what have you seen driving this increase and how is it impacting the way legal teams operate and respond?

Aaron Bath:

Yeah, I mean, I think with everyone I talk to myself included, not that I talk to myself, but you get the point is it feels busier than ever and it’s been that way for quite some time. Statistically, we saw a litigation demand grow pretty strongly in 23 and 24, and it’s remained a growth engine into this year, and there’s a lot of factors at play, right? We’re seeing an increase in regulatory flux, a lot of litigation centered around privacy and around AI and technology development. We’ve seen a lot with the growth of these mega trillion dollar companies, a lot of antitrust litigation kind of evolving and that flows downhill. And so you combine that with, I guess in the present day, a lot of macro uncertainty around rates and trade and securing materials and all of that just creates a lot of uncertainty and with uncertainty comes a lot of litigation.

We can’t ignore the impact of the pandemic also and how that resulted in a lot of contract friction type of cases from scarcity and uncertainty. So we’re definitely in a world where litigation is fast and furious. You asked about how legal teams are trying to adapt. The quick answer is trying to do more with less, right? I’m not a big fan of generic phrases like that, but what does that mean in practice? It means we’re having to be smarter and more consistent and look to automation to help us manage the workload. And so a couple points that have really changed on my end and with a lot of my colleagues is thinking more about triage at intake. And by that I mean it used to be you get a new case, a new lawsuit, or you get a new investigation or a new claim and you kind of assign it out to outside counsel, bring in your LSPs legal service providers to help you forward on that. And then you sit back and let them do the work and you kind of wait for your updates. And we’re just having to be a lot more proactive. And by that, the front of a case, looking at the scope and what technology we’re going to bring into it, what kind of KPIs we care about to see if we’re performing well, right? And so those are all considerations that sit with me every day.

Jamy Sullivan:

That’s an excellent breakdown. Of course, what we have gone through over the last several years and since COVID, and I love the idea of the triage intake and how you’ve adapted that way it’s clear the pressure is on for legal teams and it’s going to probably keep growing for the foreseeable future. So if we build upon that a little bit more and we talk about the people side, how have the expectations and roles within litigation teams evolved over the past few years?

Aaron Bath:

Expectations? That’s a funny question, but I think it boils down to really thinking about being flexible, flexibility and the emergence of data fluency and legal operations. So I sit, obviously I worked for a large company that’s based in the uk and before that I worked for a US-based business. And then prior to that I worked for complex commercial litigation boutique firms. And it’s always interesting to talk about legal teams in both of those hemispheres because oftentimes they have competing incentives and competing goals, and that’s got to be a lot more collaborative in this environment. And by that I mean you’ve got more investment by companies I think in technology of bringing more on board. And so there’s that friction of a law firm wants to use what they know and stick with the processes they’ve used historically to help their clients. And then you have more sophisticated clients on the corporate side that are coming in and kind of making demands of, well, we’ve invested in this tech stack and we want you to use it, and that can be disruptive to the processes that attorneys have gotten to know. So I feel like flexibility and legal operations, being central to litigation teams is one of the biggest changes that I’ve seen and that applies on both sides. In-house folks have historically sometimes taken, and I don’t like this perspective, but we’re the client, we’re paying the bill, the firm’s going to do what we say,

And that’s a real turnoff to me because that’s our business partner and they’re the ones that have our interests at heart. And so a collaborative approach where you’re explaining the value of bringing this tech stack to the table and why it should be utilized. And on the other side, having the adaptability of the law firm be willing to embrace that and kind of trust you that you’ve got your ducks in a row, that’s a challenge. That’s a challenging conversation and definitely a shift in collaboration. I’ve seen,

Jamy Sullivan:

And like we said at the beginning, you’ve seen it from every angle. So thank you for articulating that to the audience. So you’ve been on the other each side if you will, and I love that you can bring that perspective. And as I’ve grown in my career as well see that evolution of how a business partner between the law firm and outside counsel work. So it’s great that you have that hands-on perspective that you can bring to our audience. I continue to hear over and over time and time again that legal teams often have to do more with less resources. That continues to seem to be the case in the roles that we’re talking about, even though it’s evolving today in this current landscape. So what are some of the, let’s use biggest challenges litigation teams might be facing as it relates to workload and then complexity, which you started to touch on a little bit with what we’re seeing in the litigation space these days.

Aaron Bath:

And I almost feel like it should be requisite for anyone in a leadership role to have worked at some point for a firm. And the reason I say that is recently I was on vacation with my wife, but still working as we all do in this industry, and I got into a pretty nasty combative conversation with an outside counsel and we were up against some pretty tight deadlines. And I think having a little bit of sympathy for what it’s like to be in the law firm seat of what those pressures are and the deadlines and it’s all consuming when you’re in that situation. And so as in-house folks like me are managing outside counsel and trying to keep all the plates spinning, there needs to be a little bit of sympathy there. There’s too much work to go around as departments are getting more and more lean.

And so in terms of some of that complexity and workload, what I’m seeing, especially from a technology perspective, are the three vs volume variety and verification. We’re moving into a more data-centric world. Data is exploding. We’re not just dealing with email only discovery plans anymore. We’ve got chats, we’ve got redactions, we’ve got gifs, we’ve got edited documents and metadata that we’re dealing with voice notes. Now with AI built into teams, we’ve got meeting transcriptions and dealing with privilege and disclosure issues around that. And so just that bubble of data is just exploding more and more. And so with that, you get lots of different tools that you can leverage to be more productive. That’s a real pain point for not just senior folks, but even more of the paraprofessionals on teams is companies want to invest in all these tools to help you collaborate Slack teams.

Every tool that’s in your M 365 stack, your Microsoft, you have ephemeral apps sometimes to deal with. And so you run into a lot of challenges. One kind of modern example that is really interesting to me is I work a lot with AI in particular machine and supervised and unsupervised machine learning, and we spent a lot of time, effort and money building these AI models that are really advanced and trained on our data. So I can run data through the systems and it can help identify, hey, there’s abusive language here or there’s potential fraud in these documents. And what I found is that’s just not how people talk anymore in terms of emails. People are doing quick short message chats, and to be frank, if you’re dealing with construction project teams out on a job site, building a high rise, there’s a lot of vulgar language sometimes just in talking about everyday normal things. And so you’re having these models flag normal conversations as showing abusive behavior because it’s only looking at things in two hour chunks instead of the aggregate of that conversation over time and AI needs space to pick up patterns. So yeah, there’s so many challenges that come out from the diversification and like I said, the volume and variety of that data and how do we verify it.

Jamy Sullivan:

And I had written down as a point that we constantly hear from clients that we partner with the word volume. So I love that you took it additionally to the further step there, and you’ve already started to dive into AI legal tech. So I want to hone in on that. That was one of the specific topics. You bring so much to this conversation, but that piece right there we’re hearing constantly questions from candidates we’re working with and clients that we’re working with. And so I want to get a little bit more of your take on that AI legal tech and from a standpoint of what are those practical impacts? You started to mention that, but maybe even could you give a positive and a negative that’s happening out there and how that continues to influence overall effectiveness?

Aaron Bath:

Yeah, it’s funny. This is one of my biggest frustrations right now in the legal tech space, and I always get dirty looks when I’m at a conference and I say this, but there really is in the legal tech space a lack of expertise around ai, but you would never know it because everyone on a stage, whether they’re a partner at a firm or a general counsel at a company or an executive at a legal tech software company, they all present themselves as experts. And I hear a lot, obviously there are some really great smart people in this space that are doing good work. I don’t mean to diminish that, but there’s a lot of people, I’ve been on panels with them, they hold themselves out as an expert that just say things they’ve heard on a podcast or that they’ve heard in other panels from other non-experts, and there’s this disinformation that goes around that is kind of treated as gospel.

It’s harmful because it shapes the way that people think about this technology, and a lot of it is either more complicated than they think, or in some cases less complicated than you think. The thing I hear over and over again from people in charge, and I get it, lawyers tend to be fairly risk adverse. I don’t want to bring in generative AI to my company or my firm because of privacy. I don’t want it to train on my data. Well, that’s a valid concern, but you probably don’t want to use the free chat GBT off the shelf that has zero protection for that, that can be easily contracted around. Do you get that question a lot about disclosures and the security?

Jamy Sullivan:

Oh my goodness, yeah. And it’s to your point, and by the way, no dirty looks here because I see it as it’s evolving so rapidly. How can somebody say they’re an expert? It’s ever changing and so fluid, and we do get a lot of questions on how to govern it, how to police it, what do we use, what do we not use? And you’d be surprised on the looks that some people will give us like you’re doing what you’re using the regular chat GPT. So

Aaron Bath:

Yeah,

Jamy Sullivan:

It’s alarming at times

Aaron Bath:

On that front. I guess what I would say to people that are in charge of the decision making about bringing AI on board is your employees are going to use it no matter what you provide them are what you say they are using chat GBT and they’re using the free one or at best the $20 a month one that still has zero protection in terms of training on your data. And I don’t think a lot of attorneys and paraprofessionals realize that if you use chat GPT to say, draft a letter to your client and you’re putting information about your client into that chat bot to write a letter for you or help you edit a letter that you’ve written, make it better. Frankly, it can write better than all of us. If you prompt it, that information is training your client’s data and somebody in another state or another country can ask chat GBT over there a question about your client, which it has learned from what you fed to it.

And so that is a violation of privacy and ethics and attorney duties and that’s a real thing. But again, it’s not overcomeable. There are enterprise versions of all of these LLMs, whether you’re dealing with open AI or Microsoft with copilot or you’re dealing with Anthropic, with Claude or any of these other enterprise tools, frontier models, you can contract around those and kind of request permissions and they come automatically with certain levels of subscription to these enterprise large language model. So it can all be avoided. But the biggest frustration again is just people speaking as experts. And so I guess the other takeaway from there is find the actual experts because they exist, they just tend not to be often legal professionals. They might be machine learning engineers or there’s consultancy groups that work in AI adoption and machine learning workflows invite academics to speak to your team and explain the technology and how it solves the problems you face.

Jamy Sullivan:

Well, clearly as you are an adjunct professor as well, this is great for our audience to hear from you. I am sure your students eat this up. I am taking notes myself and just reminding myself that even our company have an enterprise solution so that it stays in-house when we’re looking at the Microsoft products such as copilot that we’re using. That’s awesome. So we’re constantly talking about that. And so from my side of the business, I do understand that. I guess then maybe as we bring this all together, is there, as you think about how technology is coming into play, is it helping bridge the litigation talent gap or is it creating new capability gaps? I’m just curious your take on that, we know how teams continue to adopt and shift. It’s going to keep coming rapidly

Aaron Bath:

In terms of bridging a technology gap. I think so. I think skills are changing to use the AI and the machine learning tools that are baked into everything. By the way, whether you’re a paralegal or an associate doing legal research, that’s all baked into all the research platforms that you’re going to be using. From Westlaw to Lexi, almost all the big companies are either Google or Microsoft shops. So whether you’re dealing with copilot or Gemini, it’s built in. You cannot avoid it as a part of your daily workflow. But I do think obviously there’s so much value. So I am thinking about specific things that legal professionals and paraprofessionals do. When I started, when I was a young pup, I remember walking into a war room and there’d be hundreds of boxes and having to go through those boxes and look at the flags, which were all color coded in some way that made sense to someone and building out a timeline by pulling facts out and putting them in order so that we could tell a compelling narrative story, well, that’s a skill that you really don’t need to do anymore.

We have a different way of doing that. We can use a large language model with scan documents, extract the OCR and build a timeline in seconds. So there’s so much of that manual work. And I think about this, that’s what trained my mind back then to think about evidence about storytelling and about how to defend a claim or put one forward if you’re on the prosecution side, I think that being able to automate those is great. A force multiplier just bulk forces you through the grunt work that used to be miserable, right? We’d spend weakens at the firm going through all that stuff, and now it’s really nice to be able to do it in seconds, but it’s also changing the way I think legal professionals think their brains aren’t organized in the same way. I still, for some reason when I’m looking for privilege, I think pink for privilege, right?

Because that was the flag that we would use on privilege documents back in my law firm days. And so it is definitely losing some of the skillset that I think helps you orient and think about things as a litigator or litigation team member. And I think change fatigue is also a very real thing as these tools change and we’re moving from tool to tool as tools get better, people have to learn completely from scratch as new tools hit the ground in law firms. I actually feel pretty bad for law firms. I have a lot of friends that are the head of litigation support or eDiscovery at their law firms, and it’s more and more common. We do this too, that for clients on a new engagement to mandate, we’re going to use this platform versus what you offer, we’re going to use our vendor versus yours.

And that forces them to have to really adapt and use lots of different things that they might be less familiar with. And that’s a lot of work, learning a new system and learning it well and how it can help you. It’s a lot of work, and so it’s got a lot of challenges there. But yeah, I’d say the gaps, they’re growing in ways we didn’t even expect. I think the same way that as people got glued to their phones and stopped reading, certain parts of their brain stopped forming in certain ways. So I think we’re definitely facing some of those challenges.

Jamy Sullivan:

Well, you gave some really great real life examples from back when to now, so I appreciate that and hopefully helping our audience look at it a little bit different way, although you’re giving me nightmares about war rooms, so I don’t prefer to remember those days, but

Aaron Bath:

Oh my gosh.

Jamy Sullivan:

I mean the automation is clearly creating efficiencies, but as you said now we’re not using, and I’m going to use this word, not using our brain the exact same way as maybe we had been previously taught, particularly in the legal profession. So it is a really interesting way to think about, especially as we have newer employees coming into the legal space, how they’re learning differently and how they’re going to approach the law overall very generically differently. So very interesting points

Aaron Bath:

For sure, and it applies to everyone. I’m guilty too. I will see a five page article that I want to read. I’d rather than read the five pages. I’ll use AI to summarize it to a two page summary because I am very clear in my prompting to not leave out any important detail that’s kind of core to it. So what am I accomplishing there, right? A three page savings, just not to read the entire thing, but it’s that shortcut, that efficiency gain. I feel like at some point people are just never going to read the long form content because the summaries are so good at boiling things down to their essential elements.

Jamy Sullivan:

It is pretty incredible. I will do that with some of the annual reports that will come out. I’m like, oh, let’s synthesize this for me a little bit. But really great conversation so far, Aaron, in talking about what’s behind the rise in litigation, how technology is really changing the way teams work think and the skills that they need. So when we come back, we’re going to get into the talent side of things a little bit more and talk about how teams are being built, supported, and set up for success in today’s legal world. But first, let’s take a quick break.

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Jamy Sullivan:

Welcome back to The Legal Report from Robert Half. I’m here with Erin Bath and we’ve been talking about how litigation is evolving and how technology is reshaping legal teams and workflows. Now that we’ve covered the tech side, let’s shift gears and focus on the human element. Erin, what does the ideal litigation team, and by the way, I’m using quotes when I say ideal litigation team look like today compared to teams of the past.

Aaron Bath:

Okay, a structural question. I like that. So I think back in past litigation teams, again going back to the law firm days, there’s that partner associate pyramid and those were the lawyers and everyone else was staff. And I feel like that staff was underutilized even though there were so many diverse talents among them. And I was a paralegal back then, a trial paralegal, and I traveled with the name partner going to lots of trials, and it was one of those, there was never really a clearly defined set of expertise attributed to the staff. It was just, you’re here to help me with whatever I need, whether that’s building a timeline, summarizing a depo, or ordering my coffee, getting my dry cleaning. It all fell into a bucket of non-attorney that’s really not looking at a skillset that’s essential because as in-house counsel now, I’m always looking at costs and staffing and looking at those percentages.

And there’s a lot of expertise you can add to a staffing of a case that doesn’t necessarily balloon the fees by leveraging paraprofessionals. The other thing too, I think about the older structure things, there was a lot of just handing things off to vendors and legal service providers. You do the initial work and then you hand things off and it’s kind of siloed in a way that’s not collaborative. And I think now I’ve heard people use the term pods thinking about you’ve got your league council that’s still steering the legal strategy, which is why you’re hiring them. They’ve got the expertise in the practice area that you’re looking for, but you also have a stack of paraprofessionals that take on more specialized roles. I think about those in different buckets. Discovery product owners, somebody that knows the discovery tool really well, how it can solve the problems that you face.

I’m also seeing more and more data positions, data engineers, data scientists on legal teams, both at law firms and in house. And these are folks that really have their command around not just the science behind it, but the actual platforms like Microsoft 365 and collaboration tools. I’m also seeing a lot more synergy between IT and legal, which I guess makes sense as technology evolves. So information governance and privacy and cybersecurity. Those used to be very much IT positions, but they’ve really shifted into legal or at least a hybrid between IT and legal. And there’s a lot of really great positions for legal professionals in that space that can add a lot of value to a team. The biggest one I want to touch on, it’s interesting because I’ve worked in legal operations my whole career and not really known it, and legal operations is one of those terms that means very different things to different people.

So broad. Some companies I’ve learned legal operations just think of it in terms of spend management, they’re looking at the invoices and the billing and getting really detailed with that, which is certainly true, but for a lot of folks, it’s a broader pie that incorporates legal technology at large, bringing in implementations and looking at the efficiency of a department and defining those key performance indicators to see if you’re doing well, if you’re not doing well, how are you performing year after year? And there’s so much value in that. And so I think that model of splitting things down and actually assigning out the expertise to different people that are frankly non-attorneys that could free up the lawyers to do what they’re great at and where they can add value,

Jamy Sullivan:

We’re constantly talking about that with clients. And in recent surveys that we just did for actually 2026 salary guide, we do talk about some of those new emerging roles that we’re seeing, like you mentioned, the data scientists, data engineers, and how that intersects with legal and creates new legal professional opportunities. So glad that you touched on all of that and to show how it has definitely evolved to teams of the past. So if we think about those teams today and how they’re shifting, what are some of those more specifically skills that we’re looking for? We’re talking about being able to better integrate that tech savvy talent into the team. Have you seen any very specific skills that haven’t already been mentioned that are helping litigation teams flourish?

Aaron Bath:

Yeah. Okay. And so it’s curious that you specifically said litigation. I feel a lot of times when we talk about legal tech, all the other practice areas get left out because what we tend to focus on is eDiscovery. eDiscovery

Oftentimes is the benchmark of showing where the state of legal technology is from TAR to Cal to CMML, all these different models. Now we’re into portable AI models. And so that’s kind of the pleading edge of the legal technology stack. And so I have a lot of friends that work in more transactional roles and real estate and other areas of practice where they always kind of feel a little bit left out. And what’s great about some of these evolving skills as they really speak to the broader swath of legal professionals, both lawyer and on the support side. So I think the hottest skill by far right now for legal departments or law firms is data fluency. One of my big takeaways to anyone listening to this is to do some free courses through some of the online, even YouTube, but there’s online resources to do courses on Microsoft Power BI and learning how data can be pointed to each other to show you trends.

And that’s extremely powerful to executive leadership when you’re trying to show value of these positions. Why do I need to pay you a salary and have you on my staff? Well, I can show you that you are paying the worst performing vendors the most money, and that’s something you should think about when you’re looking at consolidating your services to fewer vendors in the US and picking the ones that perform well for you. Well, how do you show that? You do that through analytics and you do that through data visualization. And so that fluency and data is just massive, and there’s tools out there that we use to gather that data. I’m thinking of things like Microsoft 365 purview and that whole stack of where emails and chats and all that information sits and lives forever. And is that part of the retention schedule? Is that part of the data you’re scraping to review to figure out the facts and what happened and how do you see what those documents and information tells you?

There’s answers to that data fluency massive. I know it’s kind of a tired thing. Everyone’s talking about prompt engineering, but I can’t stress that enough. The difference between a good prompt and a bad prompt is somebody that’s a rock star versus somebody that sounds like a robot, right? Bad prompt engineering is going to end up with silly pirate sounding limericks versus incredible work product and taking the time to really learn the steps of prompt engineering. It is time consuming. A good prompt takes time to write. And so thinking about all the skills that go around that, not just writing good prompts, but how do you organize them and save them and create a library to where you don’t have to repeat it every single job that you get. So I think that fits more into the bigger bucket of AI workflow design. Thinking about prompt libraries, one thing we haven’t talked about yet is validation protocols.

So when you are talking about machine learning and artificial intelligence, there’s a term that right now just kind of a black box to a lot of legal professionals, but that’s mechanistic interpretability, and it’s a fancy word for how does the model get to the output? Why did it give me this answer? And that’s going to be more and more relevant as we get into disputes about AI generated work product and judges in courts start to question that you think about the role of a special master and eDiscovery, we’re going to have roles like that looking at AI output that are specialized in machine learning and AI algorithms and knowing the difference between human feedback versus constitutional ai and understanding why one is more auditable and defensible than the other has a lot of value. So really I think understanding the mechanics behind the technology you’re using, those are all going to be skills that are transferable regardless of practice area. I think about contract attorneys and dealing with contracts and clauses. There’s so many skills in the AI workflow space that are going to help you really be valuable and provide value to your firm or your department. A

Jamy Sullivan:

Hundred percent. You’ve given some great tips for the audience and giving me even some new words that I haven’t heard in this space to think about. Good. So it’s fantastic. Yeah. So I’m curious, have there been any common mistakes that you’ve seen organizations making as they adapt to this changing landscape?

Aaron Bath:

This is more general. This isn’t so much AI specific, but it just from a legal technology, this is a lesson learned for me that’s made every mistake along the way you learn as you go. And so I’m now 50, so I’ve learned a few things. I think probably the biggest piece of advice I would give on how to avoid missteps is try before you buy. I know that sounds funny, but demos are usually given by very charismatic people and it’s well rehearsed and they’ve done it a thousand times, and the demos makes everything sing perfect and everything you ever dreamed. But it’s not until you’re in the tool and using it on real data that’s yours

That you really get a sense of, can it help me? Is this what I need? Does this results in a format that’s usable? And I’ll add to that. I think another mistake a lot of people make, myself included in the past, is not to include your daily users in that vetting process of looking at new technology and platforms and technology to bring on board. So a lot of people like to hold onto that and keep that as a secret bucket of like, this is my expertise, so I’m going to hold onto it all by myself. But oftentimes you’re going to have other people that are using it every day, whether that be the lawyers that might be less technical, or you might have paraprofessionals that are more technical, but you want them on those demos. You want them in the sandbox using the tool because even though I might understand the technical side of it better, they’re going to understand the pain points.

Hey, this is terrible. I’ve got no way to show my steps on this if I’m ever asked, or this is way too many clicks. This is not something I can do sustainably to generate a report. That’s the kind of feedback that I need as somebody that’s not using it in as many different ways as the power users. So I think those kind of two things in common, right? Try before you buy, actually test it, ask for a sandbox environment, run a real case or investigation through it, and then invite your teammates to the party even if they’re not technical, because often they’ll give you the most and unexpected feedback.

Jamy Sullivan:

Well, that’s really great advice as we’ve got listeners from all over the board, whether it’s large organizations or small organizations. So I think that’s really tangible for our audience to take away and implement as they’re potentially looking at buying. So that’s great. I know we could talk about all of that so much more. So I really want to also ask a little bit about talent retention. I’ve enjoyed witnessing your journey. You’ve talked about it from law firms and corporations, and what strategies have you seen, have you witnessed that are best for attracting and keeping top litigation professionals in this competitive landscape that we’re currently in this market?

Aaron Bath:

Yeah, that’s a great question and I am glad you asked it for a couple of reasons. It seems like a lot of the focus at law firms and in-house is on the attorneys. And I don’t say that in a way to take away from the value that they bring to the team, but it is kind of the end all, be all of the focus. And let me put it into context. So I remember when I was starting off in house, it was always the attorneys that were going around getting to go to all the conferences, the attorneys getting to go around and be involved in speaking and networking events to do additional training with all of the CLEs and webinars that I now know are required to keep your license. So there’s all these areas for development and networking, and that just didn’t extend to anyone else.

And so what I saw happen as a result, as you end up with paraprofessionals and others that remain stagnant, and even though they did a job for 30 years, a lot of times it was one year worth of work that they repeated for 30 years in a row rather than have an upward trajectory. So I guess my answer to your question is to make room, whether at the attorney level, develop them up to a more senior lawyer or in the paraprofessional stack making room and budget for personal development, invest in their training, have budget to send them to conferences that speak to not just what they do but what they want to do. That is so valuable. And I think about with me, a lot of what I know now that I teach others about, I learned from someone else. And I think coming up through the law firms and meeting consultants and vendors and service providers, that helped educate me as I was panicked on cases.

That’s how I learned. Then I feel like my knowledge grew to a different level when I started being more involved in the conference circuit, legal technology conferences, legal operations conferences, litigation investigation conferences. And the biggest takeaway from that is not only did it increase my education, but it built my network of people that I can now rely on. So when I’m stuck in a challenge, I’m not alone. I’ve got a whole community of people I could reach out to that have faced this a hundred times that can help guide me. So that’s my number one thing, is to invest back in the person and give them the tools and the budget to grow. And then the second thing is be flexible, right? In the legal space, there’s a real lack of flexibility. It’s frustrating. We have a lot of aging partners that think that butts and seeds is the best way to go

In some situations. I get it. But does that really support your mission and is it necessary for the tasks that you’re giving them? If not, there’s a real value in people being able to have the flexibility to have somewhat atypical hours or to work from home, or even having a bit of an at-home office budget so that they can invest in good equipment at home to help them do the job better and build an environment that’s comfortable to work in. So I think there’s a lot of things that companies and firms can do along those lines that modernize their approach to how they retain talent.

Jamy Sullivan:

Well, you answered really two questions for me, both about the retention as well as keeping teams engaged at a high level because we need both. It’s all part of the puzzle to fit talent, if you will, into that perspective, is retaining them, but keeping them engaged and performing. And you can’t do that if you’re not investing and thinking about career development, upskilling, we talk about that a lot. And then your tech fluency, how can they get out there and get more exposure? And all the examples that you just gave were fantastic examples of how you can accomplish both. So thank you, Erin.

Aaron Bath:

That’s great.

Jamy Sullivan:

Well, we’ve talked so much here. We’ve gone through engaging, we’ve gone through attracting, we’ve gone through retaining. We have definitely talked about the skills and how that has evolved. It’s just crazy how quickly things do continue to change. And it’s not about today, it’s about preparing what is going to be next for this landscape. And so how legal leaders, if you have an opinion here, futureproof their teams and any key factors that they should consider as they build into the future.

Aaron Bath:

A couple of things come to mind. One of which is pricing innovation. And this is a big topic for a lot of people. I feel like the hourly rate is going to become really antiquated very quickly, especially as we’re able to use a lot of automation tools through machine learning to do work quicker. We want to look out, lawyers at firms need to make livings too. And so it’s not about taking away what they do all day, but it should be more result oriented. Thinking about pricing models, and I’d love to see more of this. I’m very fascinated in the world of AFAs or alternative fee arrangements that makes sense for corporate clients like us. And so I’m very appreciative when outside counsel comes to me and they’ve thought about this and Hey, we want to use these tools that you’re investing in, but we also understand that’s going to take away a lot of the work that we used to have lower level associates or mid-level associates doing.

So let’s be creative about how to price this right to get you the result that you want. But to be fair to us, I feel like that’s a big piece of the puzzle. Also, in terms of future proofing, we got to think about data governance and establishing a single source of truth for the data. A really big issue with companies and firms is the fragmentation of their data all over the place. Everyone I know that sits in my seat deals with this all the time. So really thinking about the policies that are in place, even things that are low tech, like document retention, those kind of policies need to take into effect prompting an AI work product, and a lot of them don’t. But that’s a growing field. And again, if everybody’s using copilot to generate work product, how long do you keep that? How is that governed?

Thinking through those kind of things, the new technology that you’re bringing on board, does that fit into your policies? Do you have policies around ai? What are they? Do they make sense given the way that you’re going to use it and the risk profile of your company? And a big way to get your arms around that is to have a council of AI folks that aren’t just technology folks, but legal folks, operational folks, marketing, invite different stakeholders to the table to kind of have those conversations so that you can think about it cross-functionally across the business. And I think doing a lot of that is going to prevent the shadow AI risk that we see now where everybody is just kind of secretly on their own using chat GPT to do work because they don’t have any structure in place at the companies that they’re working for.

If you give them a sandbox to play in and it’s protected and you train them, right? I think another big thing is going to be just training and messaging to the company. This is what we have. These are the concerns. Here’s some available training. Having people come and get presentations on prompting and prompt libraries, how to leverage these tools. If you are a large company, you’ve got enterprise contracts with Microsoft, there’s a ton of resources to show you how to use copilot with Outlook, with Word, with PowerPoint. Slides have never looked better than they have this past year, right?

Jamy Sullivan:

Indeed.

Aaron Bath:

Yeah. So there’s just a lot of ways to kind of tether with the technology you’re using to make sure it fits into the framework of policy and practice.

Jamy Sullivan:

Well, those are all some really powerful insights for leaders to think about as they’re planning ahead. And for me listening, I can see where your legal ops experience has also allowed you to expand that view and provide that to our listeners. So just phenomenal insights all around. Thank you, Erin. I appreciate it.

Aaron Bath:

Absolutely. My pleasure.

Jamy Sullivan:

Before we wrap, I think it would be really helpful for our listeners to hear from you more on a personal note that if you could give one piece of advice to a litigation professional that’s starting their career now in the current environment that we’re in, what would it be?

Aaron Bath:

Just one piece of advice. It’s like, which is your favorite dog? Right. Since I’m not a parent, I had to say that. So funny enough, my advice would actually be pretty low tech in that you don’t just want to invest in the tools and the technology, but you want to get to know the people that are behind them. And again, I’ll go back to something I said earlier. Everything I know about eDiscovery, I learned from an eDiscovery vendor that made me look good, saving my hide on a deadline project. I’m still, it’s funny, I think about my circle of friends and my small circle of very close friends. A lot of them were the folks pushing boxes around back in my early years at law firms that are now technology business owners that own companies that are doing eDiscovery, doing legal technology using AI tools.

And a lot of people are very intimidated by the sales pursuit, right? They hear, oh, this person’s in business development, they’re in sales. I’ll avoid the call or avoid the email because I can’t buy anything. Or I’m not a decision maker. Why would they want to talk to me? And there’s this awkward avoidance, I say, step into that. Say yes to lunch. Say yes to the happy hour. Pick their brain, especially if that’s the space you want to get into. Those are going to become your people. That’s your tribe. Figure out what they know because they’ve been doing it longer than you. They’ve faced problems from difficult clients. They can help give you demos to give you the language and the vocabulary to talk about the stuff in a way that makes sense and impresses your bosses. So that would be my advice, is to really lean into the vendor and the LSP side and understand that they are there to make you look good, and in the process you’re going to get good. Right? It’s kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy in that respect.

Jamy Sullivan:

Well, I know your students get you firsthand all the time, so thank you for sharing that with our listeners. I think it’s a really valid example to give to those that might be getting into this career.

Aaron Bath:

Awesome.

Jamy Sullivan:

Well, my guest today has been Aaron Bath, US Vice of Litigation support and legal operations at Belfor Beatty, us. Erin, it’s been so wonderful having you here today. It was a tremendous amount of information and really meaningful dialogue, so thank you for sharing what is just probably natural to share, but I just can’t thank you enough for coming on today and sharing.

Aaron Bath:

Oh, this was my pleasure. This is a fun topic, and I really enjoyed connecting and going over everything with you. Thank you.

Jamy Sullivan:

Great. Well, before we close out, could you share with our listeners how they can connect with you?

Aaron Bath:

Sure. I think probably the easiest way is on LinkedIn. So I have a name that’s easy to remember. It’s the Arron, a RON, last name Bath, BATH. They used to tease me. It’s a good clean name when I was little, so easy to remember. But when you look me up, it’s going to be weird on LinkedIn. I’m in a scuba suit. I’m diving in a cave on a rebreather because that’s my second career, but that’s the right guy. Feel free to connect. I’d love to answer any questions you may have.

Jamy Sullivan:

Fantastic. Well, we’ll have to save that conversation for the next go around on your scuba diving. You bet. So thank you again, Erin and listeners, you can reach me at Jamy, JAMY dot Sullivan at Robert Half dot com. And special thanks to you, the listener. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love for you to rate us on your favorite podcast platform and follow Robert Half and the Legal Talk Network on X and Facebook. And also be sure to visit Robert Half dot com for more insights and resources. Join us again for the next edition of The Legal Report from Robert Half right here on the Legal Talk Network as we dive into key trends shaping the legal field and legal careers. Until next time, be well.

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