Episode 5

[00:00] Sarah: Welcome to This Multidisciplinary Life, a podcast where we explore the nuances and uniqueness of multidisciplinary teams across the world. Each episode, I‘ll be chatting with experts who are involved in and leading multidisciplinary teams. I want to understand what makes these teams so special to build and be a part of.

[00:19] Research from Harvard Business Review tells us that multidisciplinary teams outperform homogenous teams. I want to understand how and why this is the case.

[00:34] My guest today is Mick Sheehy. Mick is Lead Partner and Founder of PwC‘s Australian and APAC NewLaw practices, focusing on providing strategic consulting technology and outsourcing solutions to the legal industry. Mick is the Client and Markets Leader on the PWC Legal Business Solutions Global Leadership Team and is the current Chair of the Fitzroy Legal Service Community Legal Centre.

[00:57] He‘s also Chair of the External Law Advisory Committee at Swinburne University of Technology. Mick, welcome. It‘s wonderful to have you here.

[01:06] Mick: Thanks, Sarah. It‘s great to be here.

[01:08] Sarah: Awesome. We have a lot to chat about today. I‘m really excited to get into this. So, I want to start with a question that I don‘t actually think I‘ve ever asked you before.

[01:18] What brought you to the law? Where did you, how did you come to the law?

[01:22] Mick: Hmm. How long have we got? You realise I‘ve been doing this for a while.

[01:27] Sarah: Oh yeah. I‘m ready.

[01:28] Mick: Okay. Look, look, I‘ll go back actually, because I think the background is kind of relevant to actually where I‘ve ended it up.

[01:33] So, I did law school like everybody else. I wasn‘t really particularly, wedded to law at the time. I think I flipped a coin between medicine and law. I knew so little about law.

[01:43] I had great fun in law school. I don‘t think a lot of that was in the lectures. I ended up at [King & Wood] Mallesons. So that was great.

[01:50] I got a fantastic experience at a top tier law firm. But I also had a, sort of a dark side to me: a creative side. I was doing law reviews at uni. I was doing the comedy festival in my spare time outside [King & Wood] Mallesons. So I actually left law for a while and started up a film production company.

[02:07] So yeah. So we had a group of actors and writers and we had a studio and we had an amazing time for a few years making, doing, continuing to do comedy festivals, but also writing and. Producing TV pilots and short films.

[02:23] Great.

[02:23] Mick: I soon worked out the hard way that was going to be a really challenging way to make money.

[02:30] Great way to have fun.

[02:31] Sarah: Yeah. True.

[02:32] Mick: I then ended up getting back to my we packed it up and shut down the studio. A few of them actually have gone on to have careers in the arts. It‘s a whole nother story. But myself and my founder went back to our day jobs. I needed a break from Melbourne at that time.

[02:45] So I went to London, worked in a law firm and then came back to Australia and that‘s where I joined Telstra. So I had 14 years at Telstra, started off at just doing M&A. So I was an M&A lawyer, doing M&A deals across asia, a lot in China, in the US been in Europe. And and then after a while, I became a general counsel.

[03:08] Now we had 230 lawyers at Telstra. So quite a big team. It‘s a bit small these days, but as you can imagine with 230 lawyers, there were also loads of efficiency opportunities. And so when I became a general counsel it became clear to me that there were lots of great ideas about how to make the team more efficient, more innovative but not a lot of time to actually execute on those.

[03:34] So I took that on and did that in addition to my day job, but it was : A) I love the challenge, but B), I also started to say that this might actually be a way to marry my legal with my creativity because in coming up with in problem solving, in thinking about innovation, you need to be thinking about doing things differently.

[04:00] We set up an innovation forum, which I ran for a number of years there, we were using design thinking and other creative processes. And we were actually bringing in a lot of our junior lawyers, rotating them through the program. Junior lawyers who weren‘t always thinking about doing law the same way to come up with different ideas and run essentially sprints and prototypes.

[04:20] And in our first year, we eliminated more than 40,000 hours of low value, non strategic work. It grew into something much bigger than that. It was more about not so much even about the problems we were solving, but the culture we were actually creating in Telstra.

[04:34] Sarah: Absolutely.

[04:35] Mick: It ended up being, it‘s recognised by Harvard Law School.

[04:38] They actually did a case study on our program, won a whole bunch of awards. And for me, as I said, it was just really exciting in particular, seeing these young lawyers come in and get really energised about lots of problems that older lawyers just thought were tedious, boring beneath their pay grade.

[04:57] Mick: But, I think they were kind of missing the point. And these changes had not only were they material that had long lasting effects in terms of efficiency and also culture, as I said.

[05:07] Mick: So, 14 years at Telstra the last sort of five or six doing a lot of that in addition to my day job. And I started to also then realise that there wasn‘t anybody in the market that was really helping legal functions seriously with change.

[05:24] We had lots of general consultants coming from the likes of McKinsey or Bain or what have you come through and do transformational change for the organisation. But when they came to the legal function, they didn‘t. really understand our business. They had the theory down, but they didn‘t understand the business of what we‘re doing.

[05:44] They didn‘t understand the importance of how we were at strategic advisors or how we assess risk or how we thought about regulatory and legal issues. So, it then sort of struck me that really there needed to be specialist consultants that understood legal businesses providing their services.

[06:04] So I had a conversation with PWC and who didn‘t have that type of a capability and we thought let‘s have a crack. So we started up NewLaw seven years ago and here we are still going strong.

[06:17] Sarah: Fascinating. Fascinating. And such an interesting mix of as you say, legal business and that really understanding what that means consulting, but also the creative side and start really tapping into how do you do business a different way? How do you think about efficiency a different way? What sorts of different processes come into that? So talk to me a bit more about your role at PwC. What does it look like day to day?

[06:46] Mick: Okay, so I think you mentioned I run our NewLaw business here in Australia. NewLaw is the essentially focusing on the business of law, so the operations of law, we focus on delivering services such as legal consulting to legal functions legal tech, innovation everything to do with running a legal practice in house or in a law firm.

[07:15] But we also have a very large legal team spread across the world, 3,500 lawyers in 100-110 different countries.

[07:23] Wow.

[07:24] Mick: So last year we made a really important decision to bring new law and legal together, and we put that underneath the umbrella that we call legal business solutions. This was a recognition that our clients want traditional legal services, but they also want the new law services.

[07:40] And most importantly, they want them actually stitched up together. Yeah. That‘s right. don‘t want it to be compartmentalised.

[07:48] We have a really important role doing the top end traditional legal work, but not all legal work fits neatly in one bucket.

[07:57] Sarah: It doesn‘t.

[07:58] Mick: So you need to actually have a more nuanced approach. Unbundling it, thinking about what work should be, that is more commoditisable in nature that could potentially be done offshore or at the very least with optimised processes and tech enablement. And then what work that requires that more bespoke traditional law, legal approach by having these businesses joined together, then we can actually make.

[08:21] far more sophisticated, nuanced decisions, which not only more effective from a cost perspective, but far more powerful from an outcomes perspective.

[08:30] Sarah: So Mick, thinking about these different types of legal services that new law offers, what does your, what does a typical client look like? Are they a large legal department?

[08:41] Are they a firm? Are they in house?

[08:45] Mick: It‘s a fabulous question. When we first started our clients, our target clients were general counsel in corporates. We then moved into government and then it started to add a bunch of law firms to our client list. And whilst we were mainly focused on legal buyers to begin with, our business has evolved and our services have evolved so that now we‘re actually targeting.

[09:08] A wide range of C-Suite buyers. So CFOs, CTOs, COOs are becoming a more and more important part of the buying conversation.

[09:19] Sarah: Interesting.

[09:20] Mick: And that is because our, the services that we‘re now providing are not just focused on the legal function, but are now more and more often focused on legal work that‘s going on across the enterprise. Yeah. And, as I‘m sure, you know, the legal function gets the, the small end of the high, the high value complex work, but the vast majority of legal work is actually of a more, higher volume, but less complex nature

[09:51] Mick: And it‘s being run by the rest of the business.

[09:53] So as we start to develop services, particularly tech services that can have greater impact across an enterprise, it naturally brings in these other enterprise stakeholders. So we have a far wider buying group, but we also, of course get to have far bigger conversations around the types of things that we can provide to our customers and the impact they can have.

[10:20] Sarah: Yeah, that‘s really fascinating that there‘s different executive team members who you‘re now speaking to that are not, yeah, as you say, just general counsel or only lawyers, but very much a mix of disciplines and a mix of expertise who are buying new law services. From you as well and partnering with you to deliver that.

[10:40] Mick: Yeah. And the thing that I‘m most excited about actually, so I‘ll give you an example. One area that we‘re doing more and more work in his contract life cycle management. So implementing CLM systems. Now it‘s not just the implementing the tech, it‘s actually the transformation that goes along with it. So you‘re going to implement tech then you‘ve got, you think about all the contracting and it goes across a large, complex organisation: typically, it‘s being done in silos. It‘s inconsistent. There are different approaches around commerciality and risk. So we actually get involved in doing a big transformation cleanup exercise beforehand.

[11:16] We look at harmonisation, simplification, and optimisation of your contracting environment, then implement the tech. Now. In the past, these tech systems were probably bought by individual business units. Increasingly, now they‘re being bought for as an enterprise solution. But because there‘s no chief contracting officer, who do they go to?

[11:36] They actually go to the general counsel. Now, it won‘t be coming out of the general counsel‘s budget, but now we‘ve got actually general counsel doing something far more important than perhaps looking at just the contracts that are going on in the legal function. They‘re looking at how do we actually optimise contracting across the whole organisation.

[11:55] And because we understand how lawyers work, we‘re the first go to partner to do that implementation. And of course, our implementation is a mixture of business implementation and systems implementation, where we‘re using our technologists from other parts of our organisation, sometimes from our own teams to do that work.

[12:13] So it‘s a really exciting development, I think, for legal and the way in which. Legal functions can have much greater impact for the enterprises than they perhaps had in the past.

[12:24] Sarah: Absolutely. It‘s interesting. Just that example has my head buzzing with all the different disciplines and expertise that would be required just to input in solving that problem and solving that solution.

[12:37] What does the multidisciplinary team look like within the new law team in terms of roles, expertise? Who‘s in there? Who‘s in the mix?

[12:45] Mick: Yeah. Well, as I said at the start, what was always critical from day one was that we really deeply understood legal functions. So it won‘t surprise you that our first hires were typically ex lawyers.

[12:58] But as we‘ve built up that credibility and capability and continued to not compromise on our subject matter expertise we‘ve also then been able to bring in experts from other areas. So today we have strategic consultants that may not have grown up in law, but have now moved across and understood legal functions.

[13:21] We‘ve got customer experience experts. We‘ve got technologists and data scientists. We‘ve got org design people and people have come from HR. So we‘ve, but they‘ve the one thing that‘s in common is that. In bringing along all these other skills, they‘ve worked out how to really understand how a legal function works so that we speak with credibility and ensure that we actually get, the outcomes that we felt that those generic consultants were not able to achieve.

[13:50] Sarah: Yep. It‘s really interesting because there‘s also, there‘s all different types of languages in those disciplines that you just described and it‘s absolutely important that they all, understand how the legal function works and why there‘s value in understanding that legal function, obviously in the team that they‘re in, but also then being able to communicate with a client and their team.

[14:13] And it sounds like there‘s even a mirror of disciplines between the client‘s team and your team where you can actually speak different languages or a common language because there‘s a multidisciplinary approach at play. Is, have you noticed that? within client engagements and interactions as well?

[14:34] Mick: Yeah, absolutely.

[14:34] I think that a big challenge in being successful in this space is being able to bridge the gaps that all of these different experts bring and keep in mind, we‘re only still one part. If we‘re talking about an enterprise transformation, NewLaw is only one small part of a whole bunch of other parts that are coming together.

[14:52] And bridging those gaps is actually critical. We like to think about it. At PwC, we talk about three Cs. So we have curiosity, we have challenge and we have collaboration. So, curiosity is about, for me, in thinking about the question you‘re asking, is thinking about what are these other skills bringing?

[15:16] In many ways, yeah , that‘s it‘s not a natural way to work. You know, these people do not feel like necessarily my people. They speak another language to your point, they‘re almost, another species. So I have to try and put myself in their shoes and at least have a high level understanding of what they‘re doing.

[15:34] Because when we do try and speak the same language, and we‘re using acronyms, are we saying the same thing? And quite often when we unpack it‘s not so curiosity is really important challenge. So I think Yeah. For me thinking about challenge, it‘s not just doing my bit and then hoping that it all works out.

[15:53] I actually need to actually ask questions about whether or not, other parts that are coming into this are being bought in the right way. Are we actually getting to that end outcome that we‘ve promised when we said we‘re going to bring all these things. And then finally, collaboration goes with it.

[16:11] Yeah, it goes. without saying that you have to be collaborative if you‘re going to bring multi disciplines together. But to me when I think about collaboration, it‘s mostly about relationships and actually building strong relationships because when you have Work cross those borders and have those strong relationships and you have a degree of trust, then it‘s a lot easier to work together.

[16:35] Confidence levels are much higher and you‘re much more inclined to just get on with it and worry about things like sorting out, revenue share or risk sort of issues later down the track.

[16:46] Mick: So for me, those three Cs are actually really important in bridging gaps.

[16:49] Sarah: They‘re critical. Absolutely. I wanna stay the in the bridging gap. bit just for a moment, because I think you were saying something really interesting around the trust piece. How do you foster that trust within the team from a leadership perspective? It‘s not easy to do. How do you work on that?

[17:09] Mick: I think about it all the time. I think you have to, so if you are bringing together lots of different disciplines, a lot of areas that you. yourself don‘t necessarily know a lot about...

[17:22] how do you make that full team feel like you‘re the right person to lead them on it? And to me, it‘s about getting the right balance of understanding what‘s going on with it, but without micromanaging. Because I can assure you a data scientist doesn‘t want me to come in and try and tell them what to do. I know very little about data science. Don‘t tell my clients that (laughs), but at the same time, they also need to know that I have at least an understanding of what exactly what they do and the value they bring and how it intersects with the other parts. So that they have confidence that when I‘m making decisions about perhaps, strategic directions, we have to go resource allocation when I‘m representing their work to clients, that I‘m the right person to do that.

[18:11] Mick: So, and I think that operates, that‘s I guess my perspective as a leader. I think that applies though at any level, and it‘s that. Yeah. Back to those three C‘s being curious and challenging and understand how and building on those relationships that that will make a team work really well together and feel like one team rather than a bunch of different disciplines stuck together.

[18:34] Sarah: Yeah. You mentioned another word beginning with C as you were describing when you‘re thinking about it and that it‘s, you‘re constantly thinking about it. And I think there is an element of It needing to be always there somewhere in, in your mind or in a leader‘s mind, whether it‘s present or at least just ticking over that there‘s consistency and a constant presence of how is this continuing to evolve within the team?

[18:59] What is the balance looking like?

[19:01] Mick: Yeah, I agree.

[19:02] Sarah: So Mick, I‘m going to take a tangent, go down a new segue. You mentioned a really fascinating phrase to me in our prep for this conversation. And it‘s around multidisciplinary teams creating AI agents. What does that mean?

[19:19] Mick: So when you ask me, can I think of, can I come to this with an example of something that is a good example, is a good example of where you need multidisciplinary teams.

[19:29] That‘s immediately where I went. So it won‘t be any surprise to your listeners that we‘re doing a lot of work with generative AI. We were actually recently very fortunate to be shortlisted for the Australian AI Awards. Congratulations. Thank you. We we built a generative AI tool to review supplier claims in the context of large construction projects.

[19:50] Right. And so our tool automatically reviews these claims and assesses whether they‘re valid, invalid, or partially valid. It‘s a job that‘s. done today by armies of manual claims reviewers. So really cool outcome, but we‘ve learnt so much in building these tools around the importance of having multidiscipline teams.

[20:08] So, as you know, you can when it comes to AI, there are plenty out of the box solutions that you, can do amazing things. We have, for general business tasks, we‘ve got co pilot in the legal world, we‘ve got Harvey. It‘s publicly known that we entered into a strategic alliance with them.

[20:25] And it‘s a, yeah, it‘s an amazing tool that‘s been trained on a whole body of legal knowledge. But they‘re still quite limited in what these tools can do. Where they become really exciting and impactful is when you start to train them on specific use cases. And so we‘ve been doing a lot of work in identifying high volume use cases like the construction claims example I gave before, and training these tools to do very specific jobs very accurately.

[20:53] Now, you can‘t do this unless you actually have. Three disciplines involved in our case, we have our technologists. So these are the skillset that is doing the fine tuning of the AI. We then also have what I would call my team, our new law team, and they bring together, they bring to the party legal process optimisation experts.

[21:18] Inevitably you‘re trying to automate a big complex process. You want to optimise it first. So you bring in, we bring in our legal process people and our legal prompt engineers. Essentially the interpreting. Again, they‘ve got legal background, they‘re interpreting the legal commands and helping people bring them to life through prompts that go, give it across to the technologists. But then the third party that‘s critical is your subject matter experts or your lawyers. So you‘ve got your lawyers, you got your legal process, prompting, and you‘ve got your technologists all working together, hand in hand to create these AI tools. You mentioned agents before. Agents actually take the tools and then automate some of the outcomes so that they go and actually execute for you within certain guardrails. So we‘re creating these agents with those three disciplines. Now, this is an example where no one of those could do it themselves, but you couldn‘t do this without all three.

[22:16] Mick: Maybe they mean the same thing, but it‘s a fantastic example of not getting anywhere unless you actually bring these three disciplines together.

[22:23] Sarah: Yeah. And when you were starting to work on this, was it a process of experimentation in figuring out which disciplines Like, obviously there‘s critical disciplines that you‘ve just described.

[22:38] Did you have more disciplines and then they fell away? Did you kind of go through a process of realising actually we‘ve got a gap we need to bring this type of expertise in? How did that kind of form?

[22:51] Mick: Yeah. So it was very sort of organic. It started off with us coming back from a summer holiday and like everybody in the world realising that there‘s this thing called chat B, chat, chat, chat GPT

[23:04] I get confused because we call our own one chat PwC. So anyway, chat PwC didn‘t exist back then and that we probably better get on top of this. So, we spent a lot of time trying to understand how these things worked and how we could make use of these tools that were suddenly available to us.

[23:22] And when we started to realise the potential of using these out of the box tools, and then we started having conversations with our lawyers, they said, okay, well, that‘s amazing, but could you do, could you take it from there to here? And I was like, well, we probably could, but we‘re going to not be able to do that unless we bring in our technology guys and then try and work out how to actually take an off the shelf product and customise it. And so suddenly we realised that you‘re not going to be able to do any of this unless we bring in all of those different capabilities that we mentioned before.

[24:00] Mick: You know, capabilities that I haven‘t. Sure. There‘s going to be, you know, that you‘ve got lots of thinking to be done around ethics and responsible AI and frameworks and governance. Yeah. You‘ve got, the more impactful these tools become, you need to bring in other parts of the business because they start to touch they, Yeah. They‘ll impact resourcing decisions. What are you going to do with those people that are now no longer now actually doing that manual work?

[24:26] Are you going to redeploy them onto something else? And as you bring in your yeah, your strategic thinkers and your HR and all people. So inevitably, these things are going to involve more and more. I‘ve focused on creating the actual initial tool. I should say, yeah, we‘re not even contemplating giving this tool to our clients.

[24:45] We‘ve designed it to use it to provide basically a managed service back to our clients, but cheaper and more effective than they could do it today manually. And so I think about all the governance that needs to go across that, the quality control, all this, we‘re not eliminating all manual work.

[25:01] So what work is going to get done, by people and what‘s not, there‘s lots and lots of different disciplines and skills that you need to go and start thinking about bringing these things to life. We‘re still really early days.

[25:13] Sarah: It‘s really exciting, really exciting.

[25:15] And so in the building of these tools, how have you seen the, going back to the three C‘s, how have you seen the collaboration piece really evolve? and form. Have there been very open conversations, workshopping ideas? How has that kind of come together?

[25:34] Mick: Yeah, absolutely. This is goes back to, it feels almost like software development days where you‘ve got your teams and they‘re huddling together and then they go away and they do the little bits and they come back together very much using those sort of agile methodologies.

[25:49] And again, they‘ve been, they‘re the perfect sort of structures to have these teams coming together and working, not the way that a typical lawyer would work. But a lot of fun and it‘s, it‘s amazing coming up with a product that is going to be able to be used again and again and again. Rather than what we‘ve often been used to in Law which is that we create an amazing one-off piece of advice that

[26:16] gets filed away in a draw

[26:17] Mick: and doesn‘t come out again unless somebody litigates

[26:19] Sarah: But it was beautiful when it was there, when it was created. Yeah.

[26:24] And so you‘re looking at those different disciplines, those different conversations that have been happening and talking about, we‘re talking about language and acronyms and, what do words mean among different expertise and different people in teams?

[26:41] What‘s that experience been like in creating these tools as well? Has the team had to go through a learning process of terminology and how things work? If it‘s not their discipline what‘s that been like?

[26:53] Mick: I feel so unqualified to answer this question because my team is like steps ahead of me.

[27:01] And so I keep getting amazed every time I‘m having a conversation with them because they‘re talking, they‘re using new language. A few months ago, they were telling me about. Rag. I better go and Google what rag is in a retrieval, augmented generation. So what ends up happening is I spend a lot of time learning. Watching all these YouTube videos. That‘s

[27:21] Sarah: Awesome.

[27:22] Mick: Generally not YouTube. We‘ve been really fortunate to have some amazing experts, scientists, teachers that are part of our learning academies at PWC. I spent quite a few days with an amazing scientist that we had from young guy from Sweden.

[27:36] And I go to sleep thinking about his Swedish accent. But yeah, we, yeah, we have to, my main point is it‘s a new frontier. There‘s so much to learn. I‘m finding that these teams who are immersed in it are way ahead of me. And so I just find it a job keeping up, but it‘s really important because this base is moving so quickly, there are new concepts, things are getting outdated really quickly.

[28:02] And so the teams have to keep up at the same speed. And that‘s the way in which I think what we create is something really special. If one part is further ahead than the others. They have to wait for everyone else to catch up.

[28:16] Sarah: So Mick, there‘s a really interesting point in what you were describing around the pace of technology changing very quickly.

[28:24] Because there‘s value and skill in knowing how to learn and learning how to learn fast so that you keep up with the team, any team member keeping up with their team. But also that you‘re also keeping up with technology and the rate at which it‘s changing as well.

[28:39] Mick: Yeah, absolutely. And I love the example of: what is the most in demand and highly paid member of the legal profession at the moment?

[28:47] The legal prompt engineers. And that was a profession that did not exist a couple of years ago. And I assure you, they didn‘t learn that at university. In fact, we‘re partnering with universities to train legal prompt engineers because we need them so badly. And it‘s just a fabulous example of: in this space, be really curious. You‘ve gotta be self-trained. To a certain extent. Gotta really leverage all the resources around you. And yeah, they‘re not making this stuff on the up on their own. They‘re relying on experts from other disciplines to bring this all together to make it meaningful for, in our case law.

[29:26] Sarah: Yeah. Yep. That‘s fascinating. And. There‘s, there must be a bit of science mind in there in terms of experimentation around curiosity and being able to try different things and improve prompts and really learn that language because it is its own language and there‘s a craft in learning that too.

[29:45] Mick: So yes, I would agree. It‘s definitely a science mind, but also as I‘ve said at the start, a creative mind as well. Yeah. Because you need to, if you‘re not following. a blueprint or a rule book, then it‘s up to you to actually do a lot of that experimentation. Perhaps creativity and science go hand in hand.

[30:09] Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. Mick, thank you for sharing that example. Really fascinating insight and very detailed window into a result and an outcome and a tool that is being created within the team, but all the different disciplines and challenges and opportunities that go with that. I want to think about the legal profession more generally for a moment.

[30:32] Why do you think a multidisciplinary approach is valuable within the law? What are your thoughts on that?

[30:39] Mick: Well, I‘ll give you a an old sort of well spoken about example and a newer one. So the old one is that I think we‘ve quite, for quite a number of years talked about the difference between a legal advisor and a strategic enabler.

[30:57] Your legal advisor is very good at prefacing everything with ‘it depends‘. Whereas your strategic enabler is coming up with options and making assessments around commercial and risk outcomes, and often coming up with a recommendation: the two very different functions, arguably with the same hat. And you can‘t do the second one unless you‘ve got a good understanding of other disciplines.

[31:26] Mick: Like commercials, like being able to assess risk, like being able to think strategically. So I think that‘s a very good example of why just being a black letter in your lame white lawyer is not necessarily going to make you most effective. The second one we‘ve already talked about it a fair bit, but it‘s generative AI.

[31:47] So generative AI is not exclusive to the legal industry by any means, it‘s going to impact business and society in many different ways. But what is unique about it for legal is that this is the very first technology that deals with words and reasoning that has the ability to actually really impact law for most.

[32:09] I‘ve been in legal tech for a while, as you know, and most of the legal tech has been really interesting and valuable, but it still plays around the edges. Generative AI is actually now going to displace and reinvent the way in which we‘ve worked. And I mentioned before about, about legal functions, thinking about the legal work they do today, this amazing opportunity to use generative AI to do legal work.

[32:34] That‘s not necessarily the domain of a legal function, but sitting across a business or sitting across an organisation. Now that‘s just conquering the work that we‘re doing today. Think about the work that we‘re not doing. I spent a lot of time thinking about. the community sector and the unmet need for legal and one of my other hats, oh, you actually mentioned it.

[32:53] So I, I, the Fitzroy legal service, we‘ve been really lucky recently to get a grant to actually build a generative AI product for our Fitzroy law handbook.

[33:03] Sarah: Fantastic.

[33:03] Mick: Now, what excites me about that is the ability to use these tools to help people who can‘t afford law, or maybe can‘t access it because they don‘t know where to start, or English isn‘t their first language, or for many other reasons.

[33:19] These tools can have enormous impact in thinking about access to justice and essentially bringing down the overall cost of law. That‘s a, huge societal, societal benefit. I‘ve already mentioned before, you can‘t build these tools unless you bring in these other disciplines.

[33:36] So. True. For me, those two examples are great ones as to why you need to be thinking with a multidisciplinary mind.

[33:43] Sarah: Very relevant and very timely. Very future focused as well. Mick, thank you. This has been a wonderfully insightful, detailed chat. I‘ve learnt so much. It‘s been great to get an insight into the NewLaw team as well and how the team form and what they‘re working on.

[34:00] I‘m really excited to see what happens next. Thank you.

[34:03] Mick: Thank you, Sarah.

[34:12] Sarah: That wraps up our episode of This Multidisciplinary Life. If you enjoyed this podcast, please give it a thumbs up, a like, you know the drill, and subscribe for more episodes. And if you‘re interested in being a guest on the show to share your multidisciplinary life, you can get in touch with us through the links in the show notes.

[34:29] This podcast was recorded on Wurundjeri land and brought to you by Sarah El-Atm, researcher, consultant, and speaker on multidisciplinary teams. It is created in collaboration with BalloonTree Productions and Marketing Expertise from August, with special mentions to Daniel Banik, Andrew O‘Keefe, Mike McCusker, Nina Wan, and Stefan Imbesi.

[34:49] This multidisciplinary life wouldn‘t be possible without the support from the wonderful guests who share their stories and perspectives.