Episode 2

[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.

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

So my guest today is Professor Julian Webb. Julian is a Professor of Law at the University of Melbourne and teaches in the area of Legal Ethics, Civil Procedure and Regulatory Theory. Julian, you‘ve previously held chairs at the University‘s Office of Legal Ethics. of Warwick and Westminster in the UK, as well as been an honorary or visiting professor at University College London, Southampton Institute, and Cleveland Marshall College of Law in the US.

Sounds pretty exciting.

[01:02] Julian: It kept me out of mischief for a few years. Certainly.

[01:05] Sarah: So I understand your research focuses on technology and regulatory disruption in the law and legal services. You also examine issues of ethical theory and practice in the legal profession. So I‘m really excited to be having this conversation with you today because multidisciplinary teams is one area of the law that I think has really been helped by regulatory disruption.

In some ways, and I think it‘s an area that we‘ll talk a lot about shortly. Before we get into that though, can you tell me a bit about what you‘re working on at the moment?

[01:39] Julian: Yeah. I‘m moving a little bit away from tech temporarily, I‘m sure for the moment, but doing some work with colleagues from the Australian National University on ethical climate and wellbeing in law firms and that‘s working with the uniform law regulators as well and also different kind of climate. I‘m also doing some work on lawyers obligations in relation to climate change.

[02:04] Sarah: Really

[02:04] Julian: Another big topic. Yes.

[02:06] Sarah: Definitely. And how long are those projects going for? They sound pretty meaty.

[02:09] Julian: Yeah, one the climate change stuff I‘ve been working on for about 18 months, cause it‘s a very new area for me and the wellbeing project we started field research in February.

So This year, and we‘re hoping to have some preliminary outcomes from the study around about November. That‘s really exciting. So watch this space. Yeah. Absolutely.

[02:30] Sarah: And such a relevant and hot topic in the law at the moment as well, and has been for the last few years too.

[02:36] Julian: Yeah, absolutely. So we‘re hoping, it‘s one of the biggest studies internationally that‘s been done.

So it compares well with what else is out there from the UK and North America. Fantastic. So very exciting.

[02:46] Sarah: Yeah, I‘ll be very much looking forward to reading that one when it comes out.

[02:51] Julian: We‘ll keep you posted.

[02:53] Sarah: Alright Let‘s get onto multidisciplinary teams. I think it would be really interesting to start with a bit of an evolution of the profession and kind of where we have come from in terms of regulatory disruption, moving into where we are now, and also looking at, I‘m really interested to explore this concept of hybrid professionalism with you, which we‘ll get very much into further on.

And the impact that all of those different concepts have on multidisciplinary teams in the law. Does that sound good?

[03:22] Julian: It does. Yes. I think we can do that. Yeah, the evolutionary story is an interesting one and I think you‘re right to say maybe regulatory disruption rather than deregulation is a good word here.

There‘s never been anything that‘s been a kind of complete barrier to non lawyers being involved in law firms in some way or another. But there have always been limits on how they get involved, and the first moves to really try and disrupt that one were in the late 1980s, and Australia was ahead of the game in that regard, and New South Wales in 1987 introduced It‘s first set of rules on multidisciplinary partnerships as a way of starting to try and move this disruption and build innovation and meet more diverse client needs through a multidisciplinary model of practice that was Played around with further changes in 1994, but this was very much New South Wales‘ contribution to the, what became the kind of model rules and then the uniform law movement in terms of professional regulation.

. But MDPs never really took off as a big thing.

[04:40] Sarah: And when you‘re talking about MDPs, you‘re talking about the type of entity that the law firm is registered as. Is that right?

[04:48] Julian: That‘s exactly right, registered as and operating as. So what we were talking about in the areas where we have had MDP activity has been around tax practice to a limited extent, property, certainly in the early years, but I don‘t think that was hugely successful. Some community legal centers operate as MDPs, and of course, The big recent disrupter that‘s in that territory has been the big four.

But they‘ve tended to go more down a sort of separate but tied law firm model.

[05:22] Sarah: And so when we see a multidisciplinary practice, we‘re often seeing lawyers and say accountants, for example.

[05:29] Julian: That would be a classic example. You‘re working together under the same roof and under the same organizational banner. The limits for that in the original model was how much management control and ownership non lawyers could have in those type of entities. The next stage in the evolution was the move to something that‘s really common now of course, which is the incorporated legal practices.

Those came in around 2000. And firms are adopting the ILP structure for a whole period of time. bunch of reasons and we‘re seeing something very similar in the UK with the alternative business structure movement that began over there in the 2010s. But one of the things that the ILP model has enabled is through incorporation, the fairly limited restrictions on lawyer management.

So as long as you‘ve got a lawyer. lawyer director within the entity, then you can have other people in director senior management partnership equivalent roles who are non lawyers. And that historically was always one of the big restrictions. That you could bring people in from outside the law, but they could never quite do the same sort of things, same sort of management roles.

[06:46] Sarah: Or hold the same obligations either, really.

[06:50] Julian: That‘s still a bit of an issue, obviously, because insofar as professional ethical obligations are a lawyer thing and a uniquely lawyer thing, then, that‘s still an important part of it. And there are rules of priority, if you like, that operate through the uniform law, that say an incorporated legal practice can‘t put shareholder interests or management interests ahead of professional obligations.

So there are still those sort of guardrails in place.

[07:20] Sarah: Right. Yes. Which is different to, say, a corporate entity that is not an incorporated legal practice, but is just operating as a Within the market. A generalized business.

[07:31] Julian: Exactly, exactly right.

[07:33] Sarah: And so, multidisciplinary practices didn‘t really take off, as you say.

Why do you think that is?

[07:39] Julian: I think some of it was the vehicle, some uncertainty about the vehicle in its early forms. So what we don‘t actually know now is how many MDPs are actually out there under the guise of incorporated legal practices. A lot of the regulators don‘t care. So there may well be a lot more now because the ILP vehicle is more flexible, more conducive to what they‘re doing.

And I think, a certain, historically as well, a certain amount of ignorance and uncertainty about what‘s going on. What the model could do on all sides, not just necessarily on the lawyer‘s side.

[08:16] Sarah: And do you think the incorporated legal practice model is clearer in that distinction between what could multidisciplinary practices do versus what can an incorporated legal practice do?

[08:27] Julian: I think it is. It‘s got a lot more traction. And I mean, it‘s become a not quite the dominant model for practice now, but a very significant model and across levels as well, so from very small practices right through to pretty large stuff. Though of course the transnational law firms still tend to be operating as either through limited partnership or other alternative models like the Varine because they‘ve got to find ways of working with different regulatory regimes internationally and the incorporation model doesn‘t necessarily do that in quite the same way.

[09:02] Sarah: And so then knowing that we‘re at this area of incorporated legal practice entities as well as still obviously the partnership model is available to lawyers. Bringing in other disciplines into their team, whether it‘s at the senior level or other team members, other professions in the business, that offers them quite a lot of flexibility and even creativity in how they organise and structure their business or their team.

[09:27] Julian: I think so, and I think in the sense, particular sense in which law firms and larger law firms in particular are becoming increasingly managed professional businesses, which is a jargon term that a lot of the organizational literature uses about professional services, firms, businesses. And their development since the 90s, 2000s, then I think that element of cross disciplinarity and sort of multi functionality that bringing in different disciplines delivers has become increasingly important.

I mean, obviously a lot of it is still around support, what we traditionally call support services in the law firm. Knowledge management, tech areas like that are classic areas for, bringing in other specialisms. But the other one that‘s I think a really interesting one is the way in which some law firms are migrating much more to a whole of business advice model.

And so we‘re seeing, firms like Gilbert and Tobin and others, for example developing, consulting and business strategy arms and bringing in a whole other professionals to work in those areas as well as as well as that link, linking that work back to the legal services arm. And again, it does go back to that basic idea of what an an MDP is meant to be able to do, which is this idea of a one stop shop essentially for certain business services.

[10:58] Sarah: And that whole of business. service is really interesting because as lawyers, lawyers are trained very monodiscipline, very narrow in their specialism. And to be able to offer consulting to a client that is whole of business and looking at risk as well as law, as well as commercial advice.

That‘s a really interesting area to be moving into.

[11:21] Julian: I think that‘s again, absolutely right and I think the magic word you‘ve picked up on there is risk and the way in which law firms are increasingly presenting themselves as part of a risk management solution rather than narrowly just the legal side and in a worst case scenario the stock business advisors rather than the do business advisors.

[11:44] Sarah: It‘s really, it‘s quite an interesting area because that is where we also start to think about the different disciplines that might come into a law firm. And especially around strategic consultants and different types of management consultants as well. We see some of the larger firms bringing in a whole area of management consulting as you say, and even.

Areas around, say, security and IT and cyber security is only becoming more common.

[12:10] Julian: And also management disciplines that are going directly to the way the law firm itself runs its business. So we‘re seeing new sub specialisms, as you‘ll be very well aware, around things like not just legal technologists coming in as a very discreet area of the business and, the level also of not just supporting in house services but creating white label products for firms that they can take to market in different ways as well.

We‘ve got legal practice management emerging as a another significant area, legal design, change management. Some interesting conversation starting, and Justine Rogers has been doing some interesting work out of the University of New South Wales on on change managers in law firms as an emerging sub discipline.

[12:56] Sarah: And is that in the context of change managers who are servicing clients or change managers who are working back into the firm and helping drive change?

[13:05] Julian: I think back into the firm has been the primary focus and again, it reflects the way in which these firms are increasingly taking on managerial logics, which have not traditionally been necessarily been part of the toolkit of your typical law firm.

[13:21] Sarah: Speaking of managerial logics, you mentioned a managed. Profession or a managed professional firm earlier. And that being an academic term, which sounds very academic in its phrasing.

[13:33] Julian: There might be a few of those today, sorry.

[13:36] Sarah: What do you mean by that? What is a managed professional firm?

[13:39] Julian: This kind of is a nice segue into the idea of hybrid professionalism.

So let‘s just put that one on the table. So the idea is that we are. Professionalism, most lawyers are going to be comfortable with and familiar with. It‘s the idea that you have a certain degree of autonomy around your work, that you have a period of long training in developing that expertise and that you also have a set of quite specific ethical obligations that distinguish the way you do your work and what you do.

Can do for clients and others. From, other professions that may not be restricted by those sorts of rules. Yeah. So if we talk about professions and professionalism, most of us who are working within that sphere have got a pretty good intuitive sense of what that means. In organizational theory speak.

That logic, that set of values and concepts that go with professionalism may be distinct from the more marketized values that we see around other kinds of more market-based businesses. . There is a sense in which a lot of the academic work and a lot of, practical challenges and constraints are framed around tensions between professionalism as an ethos, as a way of working and as a set of structural tools and managerialism as a set of structured tools.

Managing, managed organizations. tended historically to be much more bureaucratic, much more hierarchical maybe a lot more control over the junior workforce or even actually the relatively senior workforce in a managed organization than there was in a classic professional organization.

[15:31] Sarah: Right.

[15:32] Julian: Now, the argument around things like managed professional businesses, or there‘s various labels we can call them, is that those two sets of ideologies, those two ideas are blurring. . So professional service firms are taking on more and more of the ideas, the commercial logics of the management side of the ethos.

And the often explicit question that flows from that then is, with a professionalism, what happens to those professional ideals, what happens to those professional ways of working.

[16:07] Sarah: Yeah. Absolutely.

[16:08] Julian: What kind of implications does that have for all sorts of things. The experience of working in that kind of environment and your own sense of professional identity.

Some of the big questions around that.

[16:20] Sarah: There are so many big questions in everything you just described. How does this play out day to day for a lawyer who is working in a firm And they have, they‘re sitting with this tension of being a professional. A professional in their discipline, they hold a practicing certificate, they give advice to clients.

They have the, all those obligations in place as well as being a manager.

And even if as we start to roll into hybrid professionalism, that entrepreneur lens as well, if they are say a business owner or a partner and needing to maintain new business activity.

[16:58] Julian: This isn‘t a new conversation. So at one level, I suspect for a lot of lawyers it‘s already becoming just the way things work around here. So I don‘t know that it necessarily generates all the kind of tensions that some of the theorists talk about, because I think they‘re looking at those tensions at a much more of a systemic level rather than a day to day level. So there‘s a question of lens there. I think it can show up in, it can show up in tensions.

I think perhaps more for junior lawyers than it does for people at senior associate or partner level, where you start to reclaim a bit more autonomy over the work you‘re doing. But I think certainly we, we get more sense now than in larger firms. There‘s a kind of, bit of a widget quality to being a junior lawyer there.

You‘re doing part of a transaction. You‘re not necessarily seeing the whole picture of how everything bolts together, fits together.

And that can be challenging sometimes. From a point of view of professional development, you can sometimes be a bit remote from the problem areas and the decision making around ethical issues, which may be a concern for later on in the career if you don‘t get proper training and exposure in the professional environment to those things.

I think there‘s also questions around the managed business model. of possibly some increased legal and ethical risk for the firm that people at the upper echelons of the organization need to be sensitive to. And in that kind of MDP context, the classic issues tend to be around conflicts of interest, which may become more attenuated in that environment but also classically around confidentiality and legal privilege.

And we had the recent PWC case in the federal court that highlighted the complexities for organizations there, where if you‘ve got lawyers and non lawyers working on a matter where there may be issues of legal professional privilege. Who does what where and to whom is a really important question in assessing whether that privilege is going to be available or not.

[19:10] Sarah: It‘s such a complex area in some ways. aspects as well.

[19:15] Julian: I think it is. Yeah. And it‘s and, to some extent it‘s moving, still moving quite quickly as well. So keeping up with the implications of all of this can be quite challenging.

[19:25] Sarah: It‘s interesting as you were describing those somewhat theoretical tensions, it also made me think about How does a law firm and how do the owners of tho that firm decide their risk appetite moving forward? And in this lens of they‘re a manager, an entrepreneur a professional. And what are they prepared?

What level of risk are they prepared to take with their business? In the types of services that they offer? Where it‘s not just. Pure legal advice, but it‘s say that consulting piece or it‘s strategy or whole of business service as well.

[20:01] Julian: It‘s a great question. Truth is I‘m probably not the best person to answer that one.

I‘d say save that one for someone who‘s at the sharp end.

[20:07] Sarah: I‘ll be asking it, definitely.

[20:10] Julian: And it is a great question.

[20:12] Sarah: Do you see much research in that area?

[20:15] Julian: Not a lot as yet. Certainly not in this jurisdiction. It‘s, it is quite. Quite fresh and I think the consulting piece is a really interesting aspect to to that because I think that is where there are risks and I remember when I first came over here from the UK 10 years ago talking about whole of business advice to my final year students in legal ethics and this sort of fairly sharp intake of breath, which was around there, but we‘re not, we‘re not authorized to do that.

That‘s not our job. We‘re the legal specialists. You can‘t ask us to do that. And in one sense that‘s right. And in another sense, it highlights exactly the problem, which is where do you draw the boundary line between the legal advice and that which is non legal and how does that affect the firm‘s liability, its insurance base and various really quite important questions like that. So it‘s, the bottom line is it‘s definitely not a move that firms should be making without serious consideration of what their risk appetite is. That‘s a slightly clunky sentence, sorry, but I hope it came across.

[21:24] Sarah: Definitely. It also just made me think about the client‘s perspective and the client‘s needs because even in some of the research I‘ve done previously where I‘ve been speaking to different lawyers and they have said that clients are asking for more holistic business advice from their lawyers and their legal team than they ever have in the past. And they expect it as well, because the lawyers often have such a wide lens of the client‘s business. It‘s not just one aspect, but they‘ll see a whole lot. And so they‘re saying Yeah. Help me then. Give me advice.

That must be difficult too because you have this tension coming from the client saying this is what we want and this is what we want to pay for as well.

[22:04] Julian: Yeah. I think that‘s right. This is what we pay for is a really powerful part of that conversation of course. We‘re also seeing law firms getting much more sensitive and canny around how they bill and what they bill for, what they can provide as the, Almost the front end low cost or free value added services, and I think increasingly we see hourly billing being restricted much more, and sometimes not even to the heavily bespoke work, where that may still be being organized around value based principles now, which is, which I think is good and right. I think there are huge problems around the old hourly billing model both in terms of clients getting value for money necessarily, and actually in terms of ethical risk for the firm as well in terms of the pressures that puts on lawyers to work in particular ways that are not always the most efficient.

[23:06] Sarah: It‘s such a it‘s such a meaty topic around pricing. And we‘re certainly seeing a lot of firms find new ways to price their services, which I think is really encouraging as well. And especially when they‘re bringing in other disciplines into the firm. How do you price that team? And what does that look like?

Being able to see project based pricing or fixed fee based pricing is encouraging as well and more accessible for clients.

[23:34] Julian: So it sounds like the topic for another podcast.

[23:36] Sarah: Doesn‘t it? So Julian, let‘s shift direction slightly. And we‘ve talked a little bit about hybrid professionalism, but I really want to dive into it a bit more and really unpack it and understand what it is, how it‘s relevant to multidisciplinary teams and what does it actually mean?

Because it‘s such an academic term, but I think there‘s relevance in this conversation. So first and foremost, what is it?

[24:05] Julian: Okay. And it, look, you‘re right. It is an incredibly academic concept. So it‘s the brainchild, I won‘t say the love child, brainchild. Of one of the, one of the leading, current group of organizational governance, organizational theorists, a guy called Mirko Noordegraaf, who‘s a professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

And Mirko is one of the key people who‘s been looking at the way organizational shifts have been happening in professional service firms and other professional related organizations. A lot of his own research has been around, around healthcare rather than lawyers. So there‘s a bit of a, there‘s a bit of a context shift one has to do to apply his work to lawyers.

But it‘s kind of doable. I‘m going to give you a fairly long answer to the question, but I‘ll get there eventually. So bear with me and we‘re on a little bit of a ride here.

[25:04] Sarah: We‘ll settle in.

[25:05] Julian: So yeah, it is a bit of that. The starting point is this tension we‘ve already talked about between, if you like, classical professionalism and managerialism, and this is part of what Noordegraaf‘s been looking at in a series of publications since about 2007 four or five papers that focus on these issues in depth.

And what he talks about is classical professionalism becoming outdated. Why? Why does he say it‘s outdated? He gives three, it seems to me, three key reasons. One is that he talks a lot about the fragmentation that‘s happening within professional fields. So we can see this in law, for example, classically, in the big segmentation between corporate legal services and private client and similar sorts of works.

But, in reality, you could say the profession‘s even more segmented than that. So these kind of segments where that idea of a single model of doing law doesn‘t really sit anymore. It worked when nobody was bigger than 30 or 40 lawyers or whatever it may be, but maybe not now. That‘s one problem, fragmentation.

The other is that he sees there‘s an increasing overlap of professional fields themselves. The divisions, and we‘ve talked about this, for example, between classic lawyering and consulting and strategic work are becoming more blurry.

Related to that as well, he talks about. emerging codependencies of professional action, which is a vile phrase to try and explain.

But I think really what he‘s talking about is, with both of these other concepts, is that we‘re seeing real world problems, in a way you can see it as a kind of complexity thing. As real world multidimensional and complex, so responses have had to And professions providing those responses have had to adjust and part of that adjustment has been about becoming more interdisciplinary.

[27:09] Sarah: Right.

[27:09] Julian: Okay.

[27:10] Sarah: Within that organization?

[27:12] Julian: Within organizations. So again, and in a way you can see the big four model as a classic example of that where they‘ve responded to a particular need from a particular large, relatively large high value. segment of the consultancy services market where they want business strategy, audit, legal, all under one roof because those people actually need to talk to each other.

It‘s much easier to do that if they‘re under one roof. Now, what Nautograph sees happening in response to this is a sort of, I guess I would describe them, and I think he‘s describing them as phase shifts in professional practice and professionalism as an identity thing. And he talks about professional identities becoming hybrid, or organized, or connected.

Now, I would actually, a little bit of academic spat here. I‘d actually disagree with those necessarily being separate things. I think there‘s features of all of these. In what we‘re seeing out in the marketplace at the moment, but the way he distinguishes the hybrid phase in his thinking is that this is a kind of almost liminal phase.

It‘s unstable. So hybrid organizations have a certain instability. There‘s a certain unease or disease around the features and values. That those are, those organizations are exhibiting.

So hybrid organizations in a sense are still finding their way to an organizational identity.

[28:52] Sarah: Interesting.

[28:53] Julian: It is interesting and I think that‘s if we look in a kind of a deep sense in what‘s going on in some of these organizations.

We can see this process process working through, we‘ve seen it in some of the, certainly in, in the 90s and early 2000s, some of the mergers and things that didn‘t work where people were trying to bring in a cross disciplinary dimension into professional services. And that kind of blew up in their faces because the cultural differences were just too hard.

[29:25] Sarah: And they also hadn‘t worked out at that time how to manage that, how to figure out those cultural differences, how to blend them. Bring in new ones. It‘s interesting because there is so much discussion now that is more open around cultural change within organisations.

[29:41] Julian: I think that‘s exactly the big shift that we‘re starting to see. And it may be that in some ways already we‘re moving more into Noordegraaf second phase, which he calls organized professionalism, where this idea of organizations as managed professional businesses is becoming much more normalized and there‘s less uncertainty, less tension in a, not necessarily high level tension, but tension in an organizational sense around this.

So when we talk about hybrid professionalism, just to clarify, it‘s an organizational thing. It‘s not just about hybrid roles in the organization, though I think those are really interesting. And I think some of what we‘re seeing in law firms now is the emergence of hybrid roles, which do have the capacity to change the ethos and also In the short term, at least, creates some of the tensions that Noordegraaf was concerned about.

We might see non lawyer professionals now taking on senior management roles or ownership roles in organizations without necessarily a strong understanding of the sort of professional ethics and professional ethos, and that might create tensions between profit motive all the way. This particular person see the business, sees the business going and what the lawyers are expecting and what the lawyer‘s obligations require them to do.

On the other side, we might see lawyers moving increasingly into non fear roles, which is another kind of hybridity. We can see that with lawyers going into technology type positions, sometimes at quite senior levels within organizations. We can see them taking on client relationship management functions various other things.

And of course one of the interesting questions is how much power those individuals are then given within the organization or how much those roles are defined purely in subsidiary terms. And the classic model left tended to leave, as we saw with knowledge management for many years, tended to leave non lawyer professionals in kind of subsidiary relatively non senior. And we are definitely starting to see that change in a big way, and that‘s really interesting. And so what hybrid professionalism does, and I think here I‘m going to get to the sharp point at last of your question, is that I think it raises some really interesting questions about both the theory and practice of law firms.

If we move into this more hybrid space, how does this change the landscape and the demography of law firms, who‘s there, what values and senses of identity and the like are they bringing into the organization, what‘s good about that, what creates tensions around that for the organization. Big one, for me, now, is how does it change knowledge production.

in the law firm. Knowledge production is a really big issue in the sociology of the professions, so it‘s something I get excited about as an academic. We‘re sad people, what can I say? But what we‘re seeing, and I think it‘s You know, this is theoretically interesting and I think practically important is we‘re moving into an environment where there‘s much more knowledge co production.

Now I don‘t see that‘s a big liability issue because if it‘s kept within the organization as is, though issues like outsourcing and the way in which co production of knowledge and. Legal information, et cetera, et cetera may be shared between organizations is a, an interesting risk question and has risk factors.

It is. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And, that‘s, that whole knowledge side of it is quite interesting and important. The other, I suppose the other big one is, which I have touched on a bit, is the way in which that, does complicate legal risk once you start bringing other people in and how you think about that and the PwC example I‘ve given you as an example of that.

And I think probably, that‘s probably long enough to give you a couple of kind of key, two or three key examples of the way in which this idea of hybridity works through into that. There is one other that I might just throw in there actually, and that is an idea The idea that Nautograph talks about when he talks about connected professionalism, which is a kind of quite crazy and interesting idea, which is the extent we might be moving to an environment where professionals don‘t really own their expertise in the same way anymore.

[34:30] Sarah: What? Hang on.

[34:32] Julian: Yeah.

[34:33] Sarah: They don‘t own their expertise anymore.

[34:36] Julian: Not in the same way.

[34:38] Sarah: How does that work?

[34:39] Julian: He would argue that expertise increasingly is going to reside and be maintained in what he calls relational processes.

[34:49] Sarah: So like the in between?

[34:51] Julian: It‘s a lovely way of putting it. I love in betweens. In betweens are always the most interesting places to look at stuff.

Particularly when you‘re dealing in a changing environment.

You‘ve got something stable here and you‘ve got something stable there. And you look between the two areas of stability. And suddenly it goes, whoo hoo, okay, what have we got here? This is the kind of thing he‘s talking about.

But it‘s also recognizing that legal practice has always had a relational element. Deeply relational element.

But what we‘re talking about here is the way in which the various stakeholders in the firm, clients, managers, owners, et cetera, have different, actually not in a sense, different, all to some extent have a role to play in knowledge maintenance and control. In and through that organization.

And I think the kind of simple example we were talking about earlier of the the value added the way in which law firms are making judgments about what kind of information and expertise they can give away or how they‘re in an age of Google and Gen AI, the clients are more savvy in some ways, how that is also changing the relationship about how knowledge resides and what the value added is that the firm is bringing in.

[36:15] Sarah: There‘s a whole other separate conversation we could have on connected professionalism.

[36:19] Julian: I‘m always up for it.

[36:21] Sarah: Especially because that knowledge or that expertise existing between the gaps of those different roles, those different relationships. And even over time, like there‘s a time factor there that it would just continue to build within the gaps.

[36:34] Julian: That‘s really astute. I think time is really interesting. The other thing, of course, is that this implies is there‘s for the firms themselves, there may be an element of reduced vulnerability here.

You‘re less likely to be impacted by your key assets walking out of the elevator. Yeah. Which has always been the traditional problem for professional services firms.

[36:57] Sarah: Absolutely. With those client relationships and all that knowledge walking out the door. How fascinating. I‘m going to park this topic for another episode, and I think we‘ll be chatting about it again, Julian, for sure.

Julian, this has been fascinating. A fascinating topic, multiple areas of very meaty topics to be talking about. I have one last question for you. Do you think the future of law is multidisciplinary?

[37:32] Julian: It‘s a really great question. We‘re definitely on the way. History tends not to go backwards. Yeah, I can‘t see where we are now being substantially undone.

And I think to that extent, the answer is, as good as you‘re going to ever get from an academic, a qualified yes.

[37:55] Sarah: Very succinct. Julian, thank you so much for your insights and your perspective. This has been absolutely wonderful. We are going to resume the conversation at some point in the future on connected professionalism.

I‘m very excited to do that. And thank you.

[38:11] Julian: It‘s been a pleasure. Thank you, Sarah.

[38:19] Sarah: That wraps up our episode of This Multidisciplinary Life. If you enjoyed this podcast, please give it a thumbs up, a 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.

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 Balloon Tree Productions and Marketing Expertise from August, with special mentions to Daniel Banik, Andrew O‘Keefe, Mike McCusker, Nina Wan, and Stefan Imbesi.

This Multidisciplinary Life wouldn‘t be possible without the support from the wonderful guests who share their stories and perspectives.