Kenneth Grady,
Speaker, Professor, Consultant, Author
Legal Future Evangelist
http://https://youtu.be/Se1qgW_DR8U
Interview Transcript
Pamela: Hi, my name is Pamela DeNeuve, and I’d like to welcome you to Lawyer of the Week. I am so pleased and honored today to have Ken Grady here as our guest. And let me tell you a little bit about Ken.
Ken Grady is an Adjunct Professor at Michigan State University College of Law and a member of the LegalRnD Faculty. Ken speaks on various topics including innovation, the future of business and law, technology, and leadership. He is the editor and principal author of The Algorithmic Society on Medium.com where he is a Top 50 writer on Innovation.
He also was the editor and principal author of SeytLines, named to the ABA Journal’s Blawg 100. Ken is a Fellow-Elect of the College of Law Practice Management, has been named to the Fastcase 50, and honored by the Financial Times for innovative leadership of in-house counsel/outside counsel relationships.
Ken’s articles are featured in many publications globally, and his views are featured in The Wall Street Journal, Crain’s, The American Lawyer, Canadian Lawyer Magazine, Legal Futures, and other publications.
Ken’s career includes being CEO of SeyfarthLean Consulting, LLC; general counsel roles at Fortune 1000 corporations; executive positions in Fortune 500 and 1000 corporations; and being a partner in the multinational law firm McDermott, Will & Emery. Ken was a member of the Association of Corporate Counsel for 14 years, including its Board of Directors, and Value Challenge and Advocacy Committees.
Welcome, Ken! So glad that you’re here!
Ken: Thanks, Pamela. Good to be here.
Pamela: Yes. I’d like to ask you our Lawyer of the Week questions, and my first question is what made you decide to become a lawyer?
Ken: Well, I would it say it was one of those literal and figurative accidents. I was studying to be a Scientist, so I was going to get my Ph.D. and go on and do the academic thing, and the literal accident was one that my mother had in my senior year in college.
I had to drop out to help her recover from the accident, and I got a job, finished up my college. I needed just a few credits, so I did that at night. And the second job I had was working at one of the major law firms, the global law firms at the time.
This was 40-some-odd years ago, so I got to see what lawyers did, and that became something of interest, especially when I learned that if I got my Ph.D., there really weren’t any jobs out there because of the Baby Boomers. So I kind of fell into it because of this literal accident. Then the accident I had just gone to work at a law firm because it was a good job, paid well, I got to travel some and experience things that way, and that was the figurative part of it.
But it seemed like an interesting thing to do because it was complex and interesting problems, which obviously if I had gone the Ph.D. route would have been the same type of thing; interesting, meaty, and mind-challenging problems.
Pamela: Wow. That’s really interesting. And it really looks like, and reading the history of your work, is that you have really combined a lot of the Ph.D. analysis, and looking at things from an analytical place as well. Would you say that?
Ken: Yeah. So obviously I had that as a bent when I went into this, and I ended up getting my MBA because I knew science but I didn’t know anything about business, and I was going to end up being corporate lawyer so I thought I should know that. And as I did that, as I started working in companies and I had some opportunities to step out of law for a little bit into management.
What I found is that the scientist side of me enjoyed trying to make law something that was more efficient, more productive, etc., and I got into some things that I was doing, thinking and some training in Japan. That all fed into that scientist part where you’re gathering data, and you’re doing analysis, and you’re trying to improve things.
That was sort of the fun hobby we’ll call it while I was doing the heavy lifting of being a lawyer and practicing law. Over time if you were to go over the course of my career, it’s probably flipped. Where today, I’m trying to do a lot more to improve the practice of law, and I’m not spending as much time anymore on the actual substance of law and …. I do in some artificial intelligence but not a lot.
Pamela: You know when you speak it sounds, I mean I love that, and it sounds like the best of both worlds kind of merging together what you’re doing now. What parts of the world would you say your work has had an impact over the years, including your legal, you know, when you practiced and when you consulted and when you were in management?
Ken: Early on I don’t think I had much impact outside the United States because I was a litigator and I did securities law, antitrust and environment, very large cases but, primarily in the U.S.
We’ll call it the second half of my career, I have found that in the, well actually it’s all around the world. One of the things that’s fascinating from blogging is to see where your followers come from. I’ve been able to build up a fairly substantial following which is kind of fun, and then you look at where are they and literally, they are all over the world and not in insubstantial numbers.
So if I look at who reads and responds the most to the blog, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and then there would be areas in Europe where they are doing a lot of innovative things in law. So, you see Germany, you see the Netherlands, come up very frequently. A little bit in Latin America but not as much as sort of the old European countries. Frequently those areas are the ones that have the most readership of things that I’ll have written.
Pamela: That’s the delight of the Internet today isn’t it? The impact.
Ken: Yeah, that’s sort of the fun thing for somebody that’s been doing this for a while is to see that I can. It used to be if I wanted to have any influence in England and you’re trying to write an article, maybe get it published somewhere in England. It’s a long drawn out process. It would take you a year or two to do, or maybe you go speak, but the people in England, the lawyers, the legal industry, really were not sure why this Yankee would come over and tell them anything! After all, we learn from them, not the reverse.
Today, with the Internet, with all this communication, you’re instantly in touch with people around the world whether it’s on Twitter or a blog or something else. I can publish something right now that tomorrow people will be reacting to in all those countries cause they’ll have a chance to read it immediately.
That’s opened up a lot of opportunities for me to work with, speak with, and present to and mentor and all those fun things with people outside the U.S. In a way, it’s sort of interesting because there are places where they are now moving ahead of us or have moved ahead of us in innovative ways to practice law.
Pamela: Interesting
Ken: Yeah. Fun experience.
Pamela: That’s great. So tell us about your work in the legal industry and your biggest wins and challenges?
Ken: Well, you know it’s easy to think about, especially since I was a litigator right, and you want to champion the case where I crushed the other side in the courtroom, and I had this amazing victory and litigator of the year. And that was fun when I was doing it, and you get a lot out of that.
But, in perspective, I think the things that are more fun over the course of the career are the wins I’ve had working with organizations, groups of lawyers. Giving them tools, teaching them ways to reinvent what they’re doing so that the way that they deliver legal services, how they do it, has multiple benefits.
So one of those would be a reduced amount of work that they have to do to get something to their client. Another one would be a higher quality they achieve. Another one would be less stress that they get out of the process because the amount of effort it takes to produce something is less. Another, would be the more fun they have with the practice because if you spend ten hours working on something, nine hours producing it, one hour creative, you tend not to be as satisfied as if you spent five hours doing something but four of the five hours were the creative part.
And so, those are the types of things that I think today are more interesting, more fun. It’s actually, many people think of it as what I do initially is the business of law; it’s not the interesting part. What they learn is, it gets them back to the creative, problem-solving, the innovative new ways to help their client part, which is the fun part of law that they actually wanted to in the first place, so it’s sort of freeing them up to do what they really wanted to do.
Pamela: That’s wonderful. Now, what would you say your biggest challenge is?
Ken: The same group. Lawyers are massive resistant to change. And this has been a problem that many of us have struggled with for a long time. I consider myself a change agent in the legal industry for almost forty years now. I can still remember vividly the first, very innovative, idea I thought I had that was going to, you know, really help the client and do a lot of different things and just getting shot down, massively shot down, by the partners at the time.
Lawyers become very hardened to change, to curiosity, to innovative things, to changing what they do. And so the typical challenge is less, the methodologies, the innovative stuff that I’ll teach is at its base level, it’s easy enough to understand, it can get very complex, we can take it to very exciting deep things to do.
But, it’s easy enough to understand on the first strike what is difficult is getting the lawyers to be willing to try any of these things, to break out of what they’ve been doing. And that massive resistance, we see that surveys. If you survey the large law firms, managing partners, 96% of them will say they know they need to change, they know they need to modify and reinvent how they do legal services.
At the same time, about 67% of the partners say they are uninterested in change, don’t want to touch it, don’t want to have anything to do with it. So that’s the challenge in the industry, not just for me, but also for a broad group of us. We today as a profession are not meeting the needs, the legal demand, the clients at all levels of the spectrum, from the biggest firm to the individual. And, we’re not doing it because we’re resistant to taking on new ways of doing things and opening ourselves up, so that is, you know, something that continues to stall some of the work and continues to be the challenge in the industry.
Kenneth Grady’s Links
The Algorithmic Society: https://medium.com/the-algorithmic-society
Twitter: @LeanLawStrategy
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/public/Kenneth-Grady
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