Ken Grady
Speaker, Professor, Consultant, Author
Interview Transcript
Pamela DeNeuve: Hi My name is Pamela DeNeuve, thank you so much for joining us for the Lawyer of the Week. This week we have part two of Ken Grady’s interview for Lawyer of the Week. Ken has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Crain’s, the American Lawyer, Canadian Lawyer magazine, Legal Futures and other publications. I’m sure that you’re going to enjoy the second half of Ken’s interview.
Yes, I appreciate that, you know I think a lot of the legal training is to be risk averse and to immediately start with the problem instead of being optimistic, so that’s entrenching. It goes both ways and not willing to change and look at new ideas.
Ken Grady: You know, to a certain extent that’s what a lawyer is supposed to do. We’re supposed to know what are the bad things that could happen and help clients prevent those from happening. And so there is a bit of good in it.
It’s not a bad thing, but yeah, lawyers are on the whole are skeptics. They’re trained to be skeptics, not to believe what they are told, to explore, to grow, to challenge it. We have very low resilience.
If you talk to a sales person, you’ll find that they’ll say I was interested in blue not red and they will come right back there but here’s why red is the new blue. And if you say but this, they’ll come right back. So a salesperson is very resilient. You say no to them, but they’ll just keep coming back with ways to try and solve the sale or solve the problem.
You say no to a lawyer, that’s it; they’re done, they’re leaving, it’s over. They don’t have this resilience. And that resilience is really important if you’re trying to be innovative to change; because you’re going to fail “X” amount of the time. So that’s part of something that needs some kind of training.
Law Schools are not very good at teaching you to be creative in thinking and to teach you how to empathize with the client. And how from the empathy to figure out what’s the problem as opposed to the superficial problem.
Lawyers want to jump to ‘you need a contract’ but don’t explore further where they may be able to say, “You know we could actually do something else simpler here.’”
So there are a lot of things built in along the way. But, the result is, as a profession, we are sort of caught in this trap where we are not willing to break out and do things differently. And today that hurts us. Fifty years ago you could get by.
Pamela DeNeuve: Ok, now Ken who would be a perfect referral for your practice methodologies?
Ken Grady: Well, so you flip that around and you say ‘what could we do, who’s the right person?’ And what we’re looking for, for me as well as others, is this individual who is willing to say, “Ok, I get how we’ve done it for 150 years, fine, that’s great, it’s been successful, wonderful. But I’m open to how can we… (and I use this word hesitantly but with full knowledge what it means) radically reform how we do law. If we look at the world, we have over 4 billion people who lack adequate access to justice. In the United States, it’s almost 100 million people. If we look at the court system, you’ll find that there is a very high percentage of people who go into the courts, 50% to 70% would go in what’s called pro se, without a lawyer. The person I’m looking for is the one who is going to come along and say ok; we can’t just tweak what we do with law; we have to radically re-invent it.
I’ve got a lot of ways that we can do that through methodologies, through technologies or artificial intelligence. We have to radically reinvent it so that law becomes something that on the one hand is very accessible to people who need it.
But, on the other hand, it can provide a living for those who are practicing it and providing those services. We can’t unbalance the equations so that one gets everything and the other doesn’t. That’s the type of person we’re trying to search for and get into law schools, to get to these different types of programs.
Pamela DeNeuve: Yeah, you know again, I hear the scientists and because I believe everything is a science. And you know you’re talking about just really looking at the entire methodology and revamping everything from the bottom up because it’s broken.
I love what you’re doing; I think over time more and more people… I mean they’re going to have to listen because of the way that it’s all heading. If they don’t make the change, it’s going to be a crash.
Ken Grady: Well we’re seeing, and people sometimes confuse this with radically changing the law. And we’re not talking about the law. It will have an impact on the law as we make it more accessible. We’re not talking about radically changing the law so much as how we do the law.
And, what’s happening for individuals and corporations, because they do not see a profession respond to their needs, they’re doing what you would expect them to do, they’re finding ways to get things done without lawyers. They’re finding ways to work around the profession.
The danger of that, the hidden danger that lurks out there is, like every profession we have our flaws. We have a wealth of experience developed over hundreds of years about how to put in place systems and how to use various tools to help societies function efficiently. And if you strip that out, pay no attention to that or go to the alternative approaches, you lose a lot of valuable information about how to do this.
And to put it in a very simplistic way, some technologists would like to simply take the law and turn it into computer code and say now the computer can solve the problem. And, while you could do some of that, and there are ways you could introduce it, if you did it wholesale, our legal system would crash. Our society would sort of getting stuck because our system has to flex and it has to have some way of dealing with human foibles within the system.
So the problem, the way we succinctly try and state this is lawyers need to change what they’re doing, or they’ll simply become irrelevant. They won’t be obsolete but there will be fewer of them, and they will be irrelevant. They will be used for the tasks that are not important but are technical. And we see that trend start to happen. So now you hear many more voices in the legal industry talking about how we need to change, and we need to do something significant.
Pamela DeNeuve: That’s really well said Ken. So now, what legacy would you like to leave in the legal industry?
Ken Grady: So the legacy that I kind of focus on comes from my background is what is called lean thinking. Lean thinking, without going into great detail was something that came out of Toyota. It’s an idea for them that how they would deal with manufacturing issues and challenges and today it is used widely throughout the world. It is the most widely used improvement methodology for businesses of all stripes and types and sizes including in the legal industry.
One of the pillars of it is called Respect for Humanity; that is one of the two main pillars. The idea is simple. Many good ideas always are. The idea is that people are always doing all these wonderful things for us. We should not disrespect them by making them do things that are wasteful, that are not valued by clients or that aren’t valued in some other way that takes a lot of their time, that wear them down, that are mentally stressful, that are physically stressful; we should respect humanity by taking away that stuff and allowing the individuals creativity to help us improve through these different ways how we do things better.
So what I’m trying to do is through whole group of methodologies, name thinking, design thinking, agile project management, even using technologies such as artificial intelligence, automation, bring that to lawyers and say we are not respecting you today because were asking you to do a lot of things that are in short form practicing below your license. You are doing things that we can either eliminate or do through other more efficient tools to free up your time to be what you have a high level of training to do, very creative problem-solving, hopefully, empathetic individual.
What I would like the legacy to be is that I helped move us in that direction. I helped create that. Because when that happens, the access to justice problem is getting solved. The ability for people and corporations to get the type of things that they need from the legal community is being solved.
Pamela DeNeuve: In that way, everyone and everything benefit from that.
Ken Grady: Hopefully. Hopefully, it improves, and it takes us in the right direction.
Pamela DeNeuve: For sure. To kind of change the nature of our conversation to more of a personal conversation, what would you say is one thing that you need to do or that you do to manage your stress level?
Ken Grady: So I have worked in some fairly stressful positions; General Counsel of large corporations, global corporations. I was for a while, a manufacturing executive for Fortune 500 Corporation. Manufacturing has a rhythm to it, a very high pace to it and so what I found that worked well for me was this idea of lean thinking.
Because, If you look at what all of us do we have a lot of different things that we do. At the end of the day, we would like to feel that we have accomplished things. So what we do is focus on the easy to accomplish but not necessarily the meaningful to accomplish.
And then we can check off a lot of things on our list. You see people who love this. They have a “to do, and they say, “I did this, I did this, and I did this, I did 28 things today.” Well did those 28 things really move you or anyone else forward? Or did the 28 things include I put away the paper on my desk, which may have been necessary to do what probably wasn’t a big thing.
Lean thinking has allowed me to look at things in a way that says does this add value or is it just wasteful. Does it take time and energy? If it is wasteful, I want to eliminate it; I don’t want to do it, it just burden is my day. If it adds value, I will focus on it.
And when you start doing that it certainly gives your mind the freedom to say I am not going to do this because there is no value to it out there. And that takes some of the stress off of you thinking that I have to do all of these things. Actually, I don’t because no one is going to say that is really great that you did it, there is no value to it, and it’s gone.
So I found that it is a little geeky, a little nerdy to talk about lean thinking but it is a helpful way of saying do I really need to do this? Is it really value added? Or am I just doing stuff that puts a lot of pressure and time and pressure on me that don’t really need to be done? I can just let them go and that eases the pressure.
It also makes you feel mentally a bit more creative and engaged because as you take waste away and you focus more on value things and that is the fun stuff. Now your mind is like. Yes, I really want to do this!”
It’s interesting. I didn’t want to do that because it was going to take me three hours of drudgery to do that and nobody’s going to really care that I did it.
Pamela DeNeuve: That’s great. It sounds like you are taking lean strategy that you teach and you are applying to your clients, and you actually apply that to your own life to reduce stress, like living by example.
Ken Grady: And it happens. The lean thinking community in one sense is sort of a small group that has been through lean thinking for a long time. I got trained in lean thinking in Japan by some of the people who helped create it, so I go way back in this.
But what happens when we do that, and many practitioners of lean recognize this is it starts to become almost an irritant if you see or want to do things that aren’t lean. So just becomes a part of the way that you do things and how you approach things and how you think about things.
Let’s just say it is a little bit geeky and it is a little bit nerdy but also for anybody it starts to address that question; of your long list today, “What are the things that really need to be done? What are the things that don’t really need to be done? How can you sort your day out? How can you take two hours of ‘not really necessary’ work out of your day?
How can you finish at six instead of eight o’clock? How can you spend one hour on something that you are going to spend five hours on? How can you make the time that you spend on things count?
Pamela DeNeuve: That’s really great. Well Ken, I really appreciate you being our lawyer of the week.
It’s very refreshing to see someone was really number one, practicing what you are preaching and number two, really looking at the whole picture of the legal community and trying to make it better and trying to make it a better future for all lawyers and leading the way to do that. So I really appreciated, thank you so much for being the lawyer of the week.
Ken Grady: Thank you for having me.
Pamela: Thank you for joining lawyer of the week. We hope to see you again next week.
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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