Building the Augmented Legal Team with Rob Beard

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[00:00:00] Omar Haroun: Welcome to the Augmented Intelligence Podcast. I'm your host, Omar Hun, the co-founder and CEO of Eudia. I'm really, really excited to have Rob Beard joining us today. Rob has an awesome career and personal story, which we're gonna get into, and really an inspiring vision for the legal industry. So I'll turn it over to you, Rob, and and, and I'd love to maybe start with a little bit more about your story.

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[00:00:24] Omar Haroun: What are some maybe personal parts of it that are a little bit. Less well known. Don't show up on a, uh, LinkedIn bio. That, that kind of make you who you are.

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[00:00:34] Rob Beard: Well, thanks Omar for having me. It's, uh, good to be here with you today and talking with you. Uh, appreciate it. Um, you know, I, I think, uh, I can't imagine my story is very interesting to anyone actually.

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[00:00:46] Rob Beard: Uh, my LinkedIn is stuff is the most exciting thing about me. Um, you know, I think maybe, um, maybe just worth, worth mentioning, um. I, I am probably, um, less of your expected sort of GC and or chief legal officer. Um, you know, I started my career in politics, worked in politics for a number of years before going to law school and, and went to law school and had a whole different sort of plan for my career than, than where I ended up.

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[00:01:15] Rob Beard: But, um. I learned to, I've learned that I really love doing deals. I got a cool opportunity outta law school to go, to go after I, after I clerked to go work in London. And, and, uh, I took that, not necessarily because I wanted to do capital markets deals or m and a deals or anything like that, just I thought, cool, it'd be cool to live in London.

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[00:01:31] Rob Beard: And I. I grew up in this, uh, in a very sort of sheltered, you know, childhood where I, I didn't, uh, get out very much. Um, you know, my first time going east of, uh, Denver was when I served an LDS mission in Chicago when I was 19 years old. So, prior to that, I literally had never been east to Denver, only my second time on an airplane, even when I was 19 years old.

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[00:01:52] Rob Beard: So, um, and, uh, and then so, um. I had, I had very different plans for, for what I was gonna do with my career, but I, I was so excited to go live in London and, and experience living outside the US and how cool that would be. Um, and it was that, that really helped me create that, learned to love deals. Like I, and I learned to love doing deals, and I loved not just the, um.

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[00:02:20] Rob Beard: The legal aspect of doing deals that most lawyers get into, like the purchase agreement, writing the offering, memorandum, whatever. But I, I was really excited about making deals. Um, and it's that making deals that took me from leaving a law firm environment to going in-house because I wanted to get closer to the making of the deals, part of the part of the story.

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[00:02:41] Rob Beard: Um, and so I, I guess from my perspective, you know, I, I have a very, um. I have a very keen appreciation for the work that goes into making a deal happen from the corporate development team and the integration team and all those types of people, and the lawyers as well. But I, I started thinking early on as I was doing those deals, um, about various things that were.

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[00:03:01] Rob Beard: Part of doing those transactions where, you know, we were using a really high price lawyer to do something that to me was sort of like, almost kind of shocking, right? Like, we're doing this thing, or, or a very expensive second year lawyer was doing this thing, um, where not only were they expensive, but they didn't really know a lot, know enough to be, add a lot of value.

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[00:03:23] Rob Beard: And I remember thinking like, man, I can't believe, you know, people pay $600 an hour for this person that. Um, but they were paying it because you were at a big law firm and they had the, the backing of the big law firm and the partners and all this sort of thing. And so, but it got me thinking like, you know, there are various pieces of this thing that kind of don't make sense, right?

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[00:03:41] Rob Beard: That, that, um, these big deals, I. There's value in the, the partner who understands, or the person who's seen a lot of deals and understand how deals can go or can help you turn your way through a challenge, help you solve a problem. Um, but there's other parts of that deal that need to be done, that are done a million times and are kind of commoditized, uh, yet you're still, you know, you're still relying on the same type of person or a person like that in embryo to do this other part of the deal that maybe isn't that, um, you know.

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[00:04:13] Rob Beard: That's, uh, exciting, I guess, or that unique.

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[00:04:16] Omar Haroun: Yeah. And, and how do you think we ended up in that situation where you have this system where you're paying hundreds of dollars an hour for work that arguably is, you know, should be automated or, uh, now that it can be automated, should be automated? I mean, what, what, what's, what's driving that system?

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[00:04:33] Rob Beard: Well, I, I think it, you gotta go back to before things could be automated, right? And, and this, this all sort of developed. Before things could be automated. And I remember, you know, so I joined a law firm in, uh, gosh, it would've been 2009, 2010 when I, when I joined, I was a young associate of that age. Um, not so long after a couple big rounds of layoffs of law firms.

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[00:04:55] Rob Beard: They think about like the lay law firms grew up, you know, late nineties, mid late nineties, especially during here in Silicon Valley. During sort of that IPO boom. These law firms grow up and they've got tons of like administrative support staff and at the time I think a lot of the firms were using the administrative support staff to do administrative things, right?

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[00:05:12] Rob Beard: Then you get into a downturn and the law firms lay off the administrative support staff and what do they do? That work still has to get done, but now they have like the young associates do that work and oh my gosh, instead of, you know, billing out like 50 bucks an hour, we could bill out $300 an hour.
[00:05:28] Rob Beard: 'cause of the junior associates, so like sort of the MO law firm model. Almost encouraged that. And by the time I started a law firm, it was three or four associates, two, one assistant, no paralegals, you know, and nothing like that. And so I, as a junior lawyer was doing a ton of administrative work, and that was billable work, and I was billing for it, and, and clients were paying for it, right?

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[00:05:50] Rob Beard: So it, it's not so much as it was, um, I don't know if anybody really sat down and said like, this is a great way to do this work, but it was sort of more of like. Hey, we can, we had a downturn. We lay off people, we lay off some of the administrative people. We have the lawyers do that work, the administrative people were previously doing, and it was sort of like this perverse incentive because now you have a.

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[00:06:14] Rob Beard: Junior lawyers doing the same thing that you had assistants doing before, or paralegals doing before. And you can, you can actually bill more, right? You can bill $300 an hour for somebody to do copies. You can bill through notice an hour for somebody to like paste through red lines or to, or to, um, take a markup and, and, and, uh, those handwritten by a partner and, and plug it into the computer, right?

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[00:06:36] Rob Beard: That previously would've been done maybe by a paralegal or an assistant type person at a much lower cost. So. I, I don't think it was really by design or intentional, but sort of accidental that we got to the place where we have junior lawyers doing a lot of, what I would say is pretty administrative or menial type work.

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[00:06:57] Rob Beard: And, and it, it's really, really repetitive, right? It's, it's stuff that you do over and over and over again where there's going to, law school has no, it makes no bearing on whether you do it better than the next person. Matter of fact, sometimes you get worse than the next person. Um. Yeah. But, but you can, you can't, you're there and you can do it and the clients will pay for it.

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[00:07:17] Rob Beard: And so that's sort of what ends up happening.

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[00:07:20] Omar Haroun: Yeah. And, and so there, there's one beneficiary of this whole thing, which is Yeah, I mean,

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[00:07:24] Rob Beard: yeah.

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[00:07:25] Omar Haroun: Yeah. Basically the, the traditional law firm model or traditional law firms.

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[00:07:29] Rob Beard: Although I will say, you know, I don't know that I would necessarily even call it traditional.

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[00:07:33] Rob Beard: I think it's sort of the last 20 years worth of law firms, right? If you go back 50 years, the law firms. Nobody was going to law school and going to a big law firm thinking like, I'm gonna spend the first three or four years, um, taking partners markups and, and being a word processing person. Right? Like, but that's what it be.

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[00:07:51] Rob Beard: That's, that's what it became. But I, I think if you think about really what is the traditional law firm, the old line sort of law firm. You know, that was more of a, you're an apprentice, an apprenticeship and, and then doing really high value work advising, you know, that, that kind of thing. And, and um, I think as we think about what technology is a capable of doing today, one of the things I think about a lot is, has a potential to return us to that kind of a setup where lawyers are doing more advising, strategic work.

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[00:08:23] Rob Beard: Um. You know, in, in the in-house world, sort of being business partners that understand the law rather than doing some of these tasks that are repetitive or not super, they're value add in the sense that they make things go, but they're not value add in the sense that they're unique and, you know, sort of interesting or bespoken any type of way.

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[00:08:41] Rob Beard: I

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[00:08:42] Rob Beard: love it. Yeah, no, I think that's a really profound insight. It's, it's, it's almost like post internet. Technology's kind of gotten us into this mess where some degree, suddenly there's an explosion of data. Law firms become a $400 billion industry, and largely because a huge amount of that work is suddenly on the table and they can get away with having high, high.

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[00:09:04] Rob Beard: I build people. And now if technology got us into this mess, technology's probably going that, that that'll get us outta this mess.
[00:09:10] Rob Beard: Well, when you think about too, you know, technology lit litigation space isn't necessarily my space, although it is a g as a gc, you, you, you learn to know it. Um, but you think about sort of litigation and, and, uh, m and a context for a second, a huge portion of the bills that, that are generated in those types of.

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[00:09:28] Rob Beard: Transactions or types of types of setups are to review documents, right? So we, we've, technology has allowed us to create all these documents that then in a litigation scenario need to be reviewed, right? Same thing in an m and a scenario. You're going, buying a company now the company is now generated.

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[00:09:45] Rob Beard: There's all these documents that are available and they're electronic and somebody's gotta go look at all the contracts and make sure that all the contracts work for the, for the company that's doing the acquisition or, so there's a proliferation of data that has exploded over the last 20 years as a result of technology enabling data to be created.

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[00:10:02] Rob Beard: And that results in then higher transaction costs on a, on a deal side or higher sort of costs on the litigation side. It, it may improve outcomes too, right? More. I, I tend to believe that more data is better and helps you make better decision provided that you're able to intake that data and make it action and it's actionable for you.

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[00:10:22] Rob Beard: Um, but it certainly has created more, you know, technology's created more information that's available in those, in those settings. I'm not a hundred percent convinced that even with. The way that we're doing deals or the way we're doing, make, you know, litigation matters today. Not sure that we're like taking advantage of that data in the best way we can and we'll, I'm sure we'll get into it, but, you know, there's so much data at every company that exists at the company that is never used.

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[00:10:50] Rob Beard: Right. Never exploited, never available, um, because it's too costly to access and, and to glean insights from.

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[00:10:57] Omar Haroun: Absolutely. Yeah. We'll, we'll definitely get into that. Um, before we get into that, I'd, I'd, I'd love to. Hear a little bit about, from your...

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