Episode 8

[00:00] Sarah: Hello and welcome to this Multidisciplinary Life. Folks, I can‘t wait to get into today‘s conversation. It‘s a unique look at the intersection of legal work, software technology, and artificial intelligence. My guest is Jack Stoneman, a director in Minter Ellison‘s applied Innovation team, and a senior fellow at Melbourne Law School.

[00:20] Jack previously practiced as a lawyer at Arnold Bloch Leibler and worked in corporate strategy with a focus on capital markets and mergers and acquisitions. Jack holds a JD and Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Melbourne and a master of Computer Science from Monash University where he majored in AI.

[00:37] If it‘s not immediately evident, Jack is constantly immersed in multidisciplinary environments, navigating team dynamics, specialized expertise, and high performance cultures. Today‘s chat offers valuable insights for all kinds of teams, including managing the changing mix of disciplines, context, craft, and law techniques to bring people together across different specializations and define team purpose as well as the value of AI for knowledge workers in the future.

[01:04] And the questions, this sparks about relevancy, human connection, and the changing landscape of legal services. So without further ado, let‘s get into it.

[01:18] Jack. Welcome. I‘m so excited that you‘re here today.

[01:21] Jack: Thanks.

[01:23] Sarah: So we have a lot to chat about. And I‘m really excited to get into some AI law topics that we are gonna cover, however. First question for you. What brought you to the law?

[01:34] Jack: Maybe a little bit of a cliched response. But I think like a lot of students that end up going into law, really loved reading, really loved writing.

[01:44] That was probably the thing that sort of set me on that pathway. I‘ve been looking a lot into stickiness and pathway dependency at the moment as part of other roles in my job. But I think that for students there‘s a strong sort of like path dependency. In a lot of fields of life. So I think I had a strong path dependency early set by just loving reading and writing.

[02:03] I think then. Probably two others. So I‘ve really always really interested in systems. So in undergrad I studied economics and liked the idea that like the structural architecture of a system like sets in motion the outcomes. And I think that the law is that primary like architecture or structure in society that sets those outcomes.

[02:27] So if you get it right, everything can work really well, and if you don‘t it‘s really hard for like other things to function properly if that basic architecture isn‘t right. Yeah. And then probably the third one which is probably the one that‘s most dissipated in my life, is just some delusions of grandeur around, thought I‘d be up in front of a judge arguing, arguing my case at the high court and everyone would be applauding and Atticus Finch style or something like that. But yeah. That, that one‘s fallen away.

[03:00] Sarah: It‘s fallen away. Just a little, yeah.

[03:00] Jack: I can acknowledge it as a delusion now. Actually.

[03:03] Sarah: It‘s funny you mentioned the system piece. ‘cause when I when I started the JD it was after my music degree and I remember partway through the JD thinking my brain has really changed in how I see the world. And coming from a music background that was very much creative expression and kind of seeing the world through music, and even hearing the world through music to then be learning a language and a system that to me made the rest of the world make sense.

[03:41] Jack: Yeah.

[03:41] Sarah: I was like, oh, that‘s how, that‘s why things are done this way. It is such a, it‘s, it is a foundational system in our society. It‘s really interesting.

[03:50] Jack: Yeah. That, that is I‘d love to hear more about seeing the world through music.

[03:57] Sarah: It‘s small tangent, but I think it was because we listened to so much music during uni and even growing up, like playing piano and there was just always so much music going on in my head.

[04:10] It would be I would have associations with like memories or events that are completely aligned with a piece of music.

[04:20] Jack: Wow.

[04:20] Sarah: And even learning certain parts of history, there would be a listening list.

[04:26] To go with that period in time. And okay. For example, the Impressionists of Paris.

[04:31] Jack: Yeah.

[04:32] Sarah: Thinking about that movement in art as painters, but then also there‘s a whole world of music to go with it. And when you line up those and you think of Paris at the time and you think of the world at the time, it‘s just such a fascinating moment in history and it ignites, I think, all your senses, like you can think about it from a visual perspective and see the art. Yeah. But then also listening to the music, to me, helps the art make sense and .

[05:04] Jack: That‘s really fascinating. It‘s really interesting.

[05:07] It‘s all a great explanation.

[05:08] Sarah: It was, yeah. I don‘t know, maybe it‘s just the way my brain works, but it was.

[05:13] Jack: It actually made me think of it made me think of how like memory retrieval can work when you build like big AI systems because you create these like embeddings, which are just like these abstract representations of different concepts and stuff and the like, that memory retrieval system uses these really abstract representations to go back and retrieve.

[05:34] Like the thing that you are looking for really? And it made me think of like music as just like an abstract representation of an idea. But one that‘s really well suited to the human mind to go through and do like memory retrieval or understanding different things in context.

[05:49] Sarah: Yep. Wow.

[05:53] There‘s a lot in that.

[05:54] Jack: Yeah.

[05:55] Sarah: That‘s another tangent.

[05:56] Jack: Yeah, that‘s another tangent.

[05:57] Sarah: That is fascinating. That is really interesting. Speaking of AI. I‘m conscious, you did commerce degree, did the JD and then you went into computer science. That‘s right. What made you go from the JD and then obviously becoming a lawyer, but head into computer science?

[06:15] What sparked that?

[06:16] Jack: So I practiced for about two and a half years, 18 months, including my grad role in private practice. And then I went in-house into financial services. Slash sort of tech company. I had a really high billing when I joined and I was all excited to join. And then it‘s under the surface it wasn‘t quite as quite, wasn‘t quite as tech enabled as what they were making out.

[06:42] So I went through a voluntary administration process and then in, in one of those like quirks of faith that I‘m really grateful for. Through that voluntary administration process, they brought in a new management team and that new management team founded Pexa, which is like a digital property econ conveyancing platform.

[07:02] They basically digitized all of the property registry and titles registry in Australia. So I had the like. Just really fortunate opportunity to go and work with them. And I moved from law into sort of like a corporate strategy role, but it was very like technology focused because we had technology aspirations around the company.

[07:24] I. So I was doing all this work with technology, got more interested in it. I was still really interested in the legal side, but I‘d originally gone from private practice to in-house because I had frustrations with the practice of law. I found it a little bit repetitive and I had some ideas and I just found that it was.

[07:42] I, I felt like the career progression was like trying to learn what the people who had gone before me were really good at, so that I could go through and just replicate that same work and teach the next generation. But I. So it didn‘t have that exploratory space, or I didn‘t feel like there were those avenues to explore or address the things I was frustrated with the law.

[08:04] So I went to that technology company, got to the work with this really great group of people and then started to realize through a combination of things, but probably particularly through working with them and on this stuff, that technology had the potential to address a lot of the frustrations I had with the law.

[08:20] Which was really cool. Like when you‘re building really big, scalable technology systems, protocols and patterns are the main thing that you‘re, that allow them to scale and allow them to address certain needs really efficiently. And at really high volumes.

[08:38] And so I got interested in that. And then during COVID, I had a whole bunch of spare time with my hands. So I was like maybe I might go back and study this so that I‘ve got more, a deeper grounding in it. So I started that during COVID and got interested in during my economics degree.

[08:54] I did a lot of like statistics econometric subjects. Yep. And I was interested in that with computer science. I ended up majoring in AI and went down that path.

[09:05] Sarah: Fascinating. Fascinating.

[09:06] Jack: Yeah. Very I dunno, long-winded and Yeah.

[09:09] Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. But also, drawing on skills that you had developed.

[09:15] During your undergrad and then being able to, identify areas that were of interest in computer science.

[09:23] Jack: Yeah.

[09:23] Sarah: You mentioned patterns and protocols being able to scale, needing them in order to scale. Yeah. Is that in terms of the repeatability being able to then repeat at scale as well?

[09:32] Jack: Yeah, that, that‘s right. Like the whole the reason like, enormous volumes of data are able to communicate over systems like the internet.

[09:39] Is just because the way that all of those transports work and those network interfaces work, there‘s a defined set of rules that you have to follow.

[09:47] If you don‘t follow them. You can‘t plug your system into that giant network. And if you do follow them, then everyone else knows that‘s how it‘s working and the whole thing is built on just this set of standards. And most software works like that. And that‘s very, I think contrast really starkly with how the law works, where everything is like bespoke and there are.

[10:08] There are standards, but they‘re very loose standards and everyone tries to apply them on a case by case basis, and it means that then the law is just really slow to be able to grow and can‘t, I don‘t think grow at the same pace that society scales like. I think the law has this really linear rate of growth where if you want more, you know, legal service or access to law, you just have to provide.

[10:34] Multiples of the current level of resource. Like you want double, double the amount of legal services you have to double the number of lawyers. So you‘ve got this like linearly scaling thing. Whereas in society, I think there‘s like an exponential scale, like even just in population growth rates.

[10:50] If you‘re compounding at 2% year, you have an exponential growth. And if you ever have a two systems where one‘s scaling exponentially and the other‘s scaling linearly. There‘s always just gonna. Be this growing divergence between the, the sizes of those two systems.

[11:04] Sarah: We‘re gonna come back to that, I think.

[11:05] I have a feeling we‘re coming back to that.

[11:06] Jack: Sorry, I keep going on tangent.

[11:07] Sarah: No, it‘s great. This is great. I wanna talk briefly about your role at Minter Ellison. Because you have quite a, you sit in quite an interesting, unique space between law and AI and really the firm certainly embraces the existence of both within the team.

[11:26] Jack: For sure. Yeah.

[11:27] Sarah: So i‘m interested to know what does a typical day, or what does a day look like for you in the work that you do?

[11:33] Jack: Yeah the days are very varied and probably a little bit phase dependent. So we have these, because fundamentally what we‘re trying to do in the team at work in Metro Charleston, applied innovation is we‘re trying to like, build intellectual property.

[11:47] Software systems, generally AI. Empowered software systems that kind of do some form of legal work with maybe a level of autonomy that they can be relied upon.

[11:58] Sarah: Is that for the firm or for clients?

[12:00] Jack: It‘s ultimately the ultimate aspiration is to do that for clients.

[12:05] At the moment it‘s for the firm. We see the pathway of taking that potentially externally as being really rigorously tested and validated by the firm. So you can basically take it, get these systems, perform at the same level as a materialism lawyer. And then if you can prove that the, I only then externalize it.

[12:24] So when you in doing that type of thing, it is a little bit phase dependent because. There are exploratory phases where we‘re trying to work out, like what do we do? There are like planning phases where we work out, okay, we know what we want to do, and then how do we do it? Then there were build phases where we‘re like, okay, we‘re like, we know what we wanna do.

[12:42] We know basically how we want to do it, and then you have to go through and just go write the code and test it and deploy it. And then there‘s kinda like a validation and adoption phase where you‘re trying to then communicate that idea out to people. Support uptake of the system, learn from the use of the system, and improve the system.

[13:01] And all of those things are a little bit iterative. And each phase informs the other. But on a day-to-day basis, I‘ll usually be mostly in one of those for the mo for the most part this year I‘ve been in a build phase where yeah, I‘ve just been writing code for, for most of my day.

[13:15] Because at the end of last year we did that sort of exploratory and plan right. Phase.

[13:20] Sarah: Yep. And the the phases, can they vary? In length obviously as well for sure. Like the build phase you‘re in at the moment.

[13:28] Jack: Yeah.

[13:29] Sarah: Would be a different length of build phase compared to a different build phase for a different piece of work.

[13:33] Jack: Absolutely. Yeah. And I see my role as I have an intersectionality of skills between some of the strategic and legal and, development skills, but I‘m by no means like an expert in any of those. So I think for me, I would never be like in the build phase for something that‘s like a ultimately like super production, grade externalized system.

[13:59] So is, yeah so there are phases within the phase, like you go through that initial stage, put something out that it‘s not a minimum viable product. We would take it to a further stage than that. But it‘s that system that gets initial testing and use. But then to, for something to be servicing, 10,000 people for example, that would probably be then like handed off to a more.

[14:22] Like just dev devoted development team and my role would move into more of a product management type of role.

[14:29] Sarah: Oh yeah. Okay. Yeah. I see what you mean in terms of the different levels of capability as well, and yeah, and who, where the strengths are within the team and how that.

[14:38] Continues to then evolve the product or the work, the project.

[14:41] Jack: Yeah.

[14:42] Sarah: And so when you are in a build phase, for example, when you‘re in, now, are you working with different disciplines within your team? What does that look like?

[14:50] Jack: Yeah so the team I‘m in specifically. We work really closely together.

[14:56] Everyone‘s quite multidisciplinary. So we have someone on the team who has a PhD in astrophysics and is now doing the JD. And we have someone else who did a JD in practice law like I did and is, then transitioned software engineering. We‘ve got some behavioral scientists. And we do have some, like full-time developers.

[15:16] But usually they have some like broader commercial experience as well. So we‘re all a little bit multidisciplinary. We have someone who‘s a real expert in DevOps. So that whole process of, releasing code and all of the backend infrastructure because we rely really heavily on cloud, cloud resources.

[15:32] So you know, when I have a problem with like my deployment or working out what infrastructure to leverage for different parts of the application. I‘ll go and speak to go and speak to this person.

[15:44] And, through that conversation, he‘ll be able to resolve in half an hour what would‘ve, taken me hours or, days, weeks.

[15:53] It‘s really nice just being able to like. Bounce off people with these, I dunno. They talk about the T-shaped sort of corporate person, but yeah. I think we do. We‘re all a little bit like that and then we know who to speak to for that specific expertise.

[16:06] Sarah: Yeah. Lean on each other‘s strengths.

[16:08] Jack: Yeah. And then just the broader law firm as well we will we‘ll have ideas, but again, like I didn‘t practice for a long time, so I‘ll have ideas with things, but we‘ll go out into the firm to get validation and understand more deeply, like what is the process that they‘re following what would be beneficial?

[16:24] Sarah: Yeah. The team that you work in, is that a, it sounds like it‘s a persistent team That‘s right. Yeah. So you guys always come together to work on something. And then do you bring in other people from the firm or do you go out to see them? How does that

[16:39] Jack: Both. Yeah. Yeah. So we‘ll go out into the firm and approach people if we have ideas, but we also have people coming to us with ideas.

[16:47] Sarah: Yeah. It‘s quite a varied mix of ways of working as well.

[16:52] Jack: Yeah.

[16:52] Sarah: Alright. Let‘s dive into this big topic of AI. Yeah. I‘m so excited to get into this. So Jack we are knowledge workers.

[17:01] One way to describe the legal profession is a broad spectrum of knowledge workers. And when I was speaking with professor Julian Webb in season one, we were talking about this idea of the evolution of AI. And especially the evolution of AI into law and the legal profession, but specifically thinking about how it impacts knowledge workers.

[17:27] And Julian is very aware of this phenomenon of AI disrupting the thinking process.

[17:36] And it‘s been on my mind a lot because we use AI day to day. I access it for all sorts of questions and thinking as well and ideas. And recently I was thinking to myself, I wonder if what I‘m doing right now is disrupting my thinking process.

[17:54] And I wanted to ask you about it because where the work that you are doing and where you are sitting with AI and the law, I wondered what your perspective might be on that phenomenon. Do you think it disrupts the thinking process? What are your thoughts on this?

[18:09] Jack: I have no doubt that it is disrupting the thinking process.

[18:12] None at all. And it does it does concern me too. I think the future with AI is it‘s very fun to work on, but it‘s also very scary. And the rate of change is massive. And I think it‘s it‘s too far advanced to think that we can stop it, but these conversations around what the effects are on people on society broadly are really important.

[18:32] And I don‘t think they‘re happening quite enough. I definitely feel like I‘m, innately learning or like memorizing things far less than I would‘ve had to in the past. So I did learn to code pre AI and actually found that really slow, but also really really gratifying. And I formed a I think, good mental model around different, like coding paradigms and. Had that structure. I think I rely less on those mental models now and I give these instructions around what I‘d like to happen and see the code produced and then incorporate that into my work.

[19:10] And even that, I think is probably lower level than what we‘re going to see in the future. With programming. OpenAI just relates Codex, which is just a really. I think only just last week, but it looks like a really powerful way to instruct groups of agents to go through and interact directly in your code base.

[19:30] So yeah, I think the patterns I. Of work and the patterns of thinking have changed. I think that probably throughout time they‘ve always changed in response to whatever, like the dominant technology paradigm is. I think that and we see this like. People that people talk about, for mental health, the green space is really important, that we should be outside in nature.

[19:53] I guess maybe throughout, throughout history at different times, different people have spent, the dominant part of their lives in nature. And. Working the land and using their hands and like that hand to mind connection was like, like a type of thought process. And maybe that was like what you had to really hone is your ability to work a tool or an instrument. And so that was the dominant thought process at the time in response to whatever the prevailing technologies were. And then, industrial farming came or. And replace that. And so most people weren‘t working on the land and some other sort of like dominant thought process took effect.

[20:29] And that was maybe the one now that we‘ve seen in knowledge work or at least four knowledge workers that the dominant thought process looks slightly different to that. And then maybe we‘re gonna go through a phase where you know, that changes again and. And that‘s not always a good thing because I think that people find a lot of joy working with their hands, find a lot of there‘s a lot of kind of gratification in doing that.

[20:55] And then sometimes the I don‘t know, the shift to like knowledge work maybe wasn‘t a healthy one. Because you‘ve got a lot of people sitting at office sitting‘s not particularly healthy necessarily. Yeah, and so maybe a shift away from what is now the do thought process isn‘t necessarily a bad thing, but we should think really carefully about what it is or what replaces it so that people are happy and fulfilled.

[21:17] I think it‘s like quite a philosophical question. I don‘t have a good answer to it. I have a lot of thoughts.

[21:21] Sarah: It‘s I think it‘s also, we are in a space at the moment where this is really new, like in the grand scheme of time...

[21:31] Jack: super new.

[21:32] Sarah: This is so new and this is so minute. I don‘t even think our brains can fathom how early this is.

[21:39] And we are in this space of it changing and so there are no clear answers on what this might look like. And it‘s, I think it‘s really hard to predict in many ways because like you say. Over time, tools of trade have changed and how we work has changed, and professions have been created that never existed previously, and they‘ve evolved over time as well.

[22:06] I wonder, the value of knowledge work in the future, surely is going to change in my mind it‘s gonna change. I think so because how you use AI and how you stay valuable as a professional, as a knowledge worker in the future, while maybe using AI to your advantage or being so knowledgeable about it and understanding more of the mechanics around it. There‘s all different possibilities of how that might work.

[22:37] And even. How you then maintain those really human connections and human relationships with people. I think is also gonna be super important.

[22:48] Jack: For sure.

[22:49] Sarah: Especially for these, for professions like lawyers and accountants and consultants.

[22:54] Jack: Yeah, I think that‘s I think that‘s probably right. I do find it hard to really forecast too far into the future with this. And I do think the disruption will be really significant. There‘s a line at the moment that‘s commonly parroted a little bit in the legal tech industry, which is that, AI won‘t replace a lawyer.

[23:18] Lawyers using AI will replace lawyers who don‘t. And I think, I don‘t know, I think it‘s a little bit disingenuous sometimes. Because I think that I. There‘s not, there‘s a non-trivial possibility that AI does replace lawyers. And it does replace accountants. And I think that, and other knowledge roles, and I think we need to at least be cognizant of that, whether it‘s a risk or an opportunity depending on your perspective.

[23:47] But I think we should be cognizant that could happen.

[23:49] And try and think about what does that mean? What does that mean for society if it does happen? I think for the legal industry and just speaking to that specifically, ‘cause I suppose it‘s the one I know, I think there is a really there‘s a really unique opportunity right now for introspection and like an understanding of what does legal industry actually exists for?

[24:10] What is its role in creating value for society. I think at the moment there‘s a default. People default and companies default to legal services in certain situations, but I don‘t think just existing as a default option necessarily is the right way for an industry to exist. And I think thinking about what is the true value creation?

[24:30] What is the way that this, the practitioners in this industry and the industry itself exists to like, provide benefit and further society is a unique opportunity to have that conversation now. I think that having that conversation maybe is the best chance to create resilience in the industry.

[24:47] Sarah: It‘s a big question there because there‘s so many different parts of the legal industry.

[24:55] And I wonder even if, even as you were just describing that, I was thinking about does this question apply more to corporate lawyers and law firms.

[25:07] Does it, how much of this question does it apply with injustice and the courts?

[25:12] The criminal law space, family law space.

[25:14] Community legal centers. And access to justice. And better services for people who are grappling with life issues. That become legal issues. It‘s a big question.

[25:27] Jack: It‘s a massive question. Yeah. It‘s it‘s one of the things that excites me about this space is that I think the breadth of questions that are worth tackling. Is really enormous. I think that you could take the courts for example and say, okay, why do they exist? And so many reasons. So there a limit on the state monopolizes violence and therefore has the ability to incarcerate people for committing crimes.

[25:52] That‘s one thing. Through that same monopolizer. Accusation of violence. The state is able to compel companies to act in certain ways and resolve disputes between two enterprise, private enterprises where one claims the other one owes them money. It‘s should the courts be doing both of those things into the future?

[26:10] And how should the court prioritize those two things? Should the court expend finite limited resources on. Doing criminal type of things or handling migration cases or resolving disputes between giant corporate entities. And this is really trite and a superficial analysis, but like to, to me, my intuition is that maybe in the future.

[26:33] The courts actually should spend less time just resolving disputes between major banks and, property developers and focus on like the social things. And there may be a more efficient mechanism to resolve disputes between, just private enterprises and society and private interests.

[26:52] More efficient, both from a social perspective so that the courts aren‘t having to handle all of that. Maybe also more efficient from the, perspective of those companies and those people as well. Because the resolution gets resolved faster. They can get on with doing their work and, doing whatever it is that they exist to do.

[27:08] Sarah: And money better spent in other places. Even for people like shareholders and how is that? Yeah.

[27:14] Jack: Because it just seems to have grown like this idea of a court system. It seems to have just grown into it encapsulates and handles everything. Everything just flows into it. Every contractual dispute, every sort of regulatory dispute.

[27:27] Being combined into things that are really personal and important to individuals lives. A computer science system wouldn‘t develop in that way, I don‘t think.

[27:39] Sarah: Slightly differently.

[27:39] Jack you raised some fascinating and complex questions of the law, the legal industry, AI, and its presence. I‘m gonna move back a little bit to multidisciplinary environments Yeah. And teams and what that looks like over the course of a career.

[27:59] What do you find most challenging about working in a multidisciplinary environment?

[28:05] Jack: I think the most challenging thing I. Is trying to create a shared mental model. So I think that like broadly, people work a little bit individually. Like they, they have, they spend, like 80% of their time in their own mind, doing their own thing without someone looking over their shoulder.

[28:22] And that, that only really works if you have a shared mental model of what you‘re trying to achieve, why you‘re trying to achieve it, what the method is to go about doing that. I think that when you have multidisciplinary teams, each discipline comes with their kind of like their own language or their own mental model of how the world works.

[28:41] And to get that team to work together really cohesively and powerfully, you have to create some sort of shared mental model, which usually I think means taking parts of each of those different worlds and combining them into some sort of common understanding. But that‘s, that is a challenge ‘cause it‘s really frustrating sometimes I think if you have a clear idea in your mind about how something should work or how it does work in, and then trying to communicate that to someone who has a really different mental model of how that thing works or should work. Yeah. And in law, for example, versus software. Those mental models are like, they can be worlds apart sometimes. Yeah. Really worlds apart, so there are frustrations in that, but I think that is also like the great, the greatest benefit of the multidisciplinary team. It‘s having to go through that discipline and rigor of creating a shared mental model usually means that the assumptions of both of those kind of like.

[29:37] Both of those mental models are really like rigorously tested and the things that are wrong are often carved out, and that shared mental model that you end up with is maybe like a more realistic one or a more powerful one to take forward.

[29:53] Sarah: How do you bridge that gap? Do you have strategies or techniques or things that you rely on to help bridge that gap when you are with those other people and other disciplines? And we need this shared mental model. Where do you, how do you start? Where do you start from?

[30:11] Jack: I think reasoning through analogy is really powerful. So if you take like a legal concept, and you‘re trying to explain that to a software engineer, you might have the idea of like definitions in a contract and definitions can either be defined at the top of the contract or they can be defined like in the clause. And if they‘re defined in the clause, then they usually relate to the.

[30:32] Like the clause. And if they‘re defined at the top level, then you can expect them to be available to the entire contract. If you write a software program, you can have like global and local variables. So global variables are accessible to the entire program.

[30:43] And then local variables are defined within a function, for example, and are available to that function, but not necessarily without it.

[30:50] So if you‘re trying to explain that concept of definitions to a software engineer. You can find that parallel or that analogy and then often they‘ll be like, "oh, cool. Yeah, I get it." And that analogy works in the reverse as well to try and explain to a lawyer how that system‘s working or maybe why it didn‘t work according to their expectations.

[31:10] They were like, wait, but I like, I put this definition here. And it‘s oh yeah, but you put that definition in the function. But you wouldn‘t say that. You‘d be like, you put it, in the clause. So it‘s like clause scoped as opposed to like globally scoped. And I think there‘s almost always an opportunity to do that.

[31:24] As I had a lot of questions from lawyers talking about gen systems recently and how they work. And one of the analogies that I‘ve found really powerful in explaining that is talking about like. How the court system works. So you wouldn‘t take a really complex dispute to a judge and just say, Hey what‘s the answer, judge?

[31:43] Tell me, tell the judge would be like I don‘t know. I need to review a million different emails to work out the facts and then I need to read all this case law and then I need someone to synthesize the critical arguments in that case. And if I get like a really. Just like a really good, concise distillation of all the key facts and all the key legal issues presented to me, then I‘ll be able to make a determination and a agentic AI system might work in the exact same way.

[32:08] Don‘t expect chat GPT for example, just to be able to answer a really complex question. But of course, you could build a system that does that by having lots of little worker agents that are going through and determining facts about. Documents to understand what is the, most probable factual position.

[32:24] And then and then having different worker agents that are going through and synthesizing the critical parts of the law, and then feeding that right up to, a really powerful reasoning model, for example, that‘s able to do that. But only once that distillation process has occurred. And then.

[32:38] And then lawyers are like, oh, okay. Like I get what an agentic system is because they‘re picturing that kind of like pyramid structure of the court. And so just, yeah, those sort of analogies I find really helpful.

[32:51] Sarah: Everything you were describing there makes me think about the value of language and understanding.

[32:57] Language and understanding someone else‘s language. Obviously as well as your own so that you can create a common space. Which I think speaks to your shared mental model as well.

[33:10] How are you finding people embracing that analogy, the shared language, the common language, and really thinking about we need to be able to.

[33:22] Exist in the gap as opposed to, you just come to my side of the fence and we‘ll do it this way.

[33:29] How do you what‘s your experience with that? What‘s that like for you?

[33:33] Jack: There‘s a spectrum. I think some people are really willing to embrace the intersection. Some people. I think have developed so much sort of credibility and, social recognition and financial achievement through being experts in one domain and one system of language that they‘re a little bit more reticent to, to move into the space.

[33:54] I think that some of those people, once they move into the space, once they start to find ways to express themselves, then can be some of the most ardent adopters of the shared space. But that barrier can be a little tricky to cross. It is, I think it‘s really sort of case by case dependent.

[34:08] If you find a lot of people are really willing to come in and share that space. I think a lot of people enjoy moving into that, that shared mental model. And then if they‘re less willing, then it‘s just about working out why. Sometimes it is just an insecurity, sometimes it‘s a defensiveness.

[34:27] They just really like their space and they wanna stay there and they don‘t want to because, because I guess a natural consequence of having a shared mental space or some sort of shared operating space is it does encroach on both of those spaces. So if you‘ve got a space out here, which is really nicely defined.

[34:46] People can be a little bit territorial and defensive about that. They don‘t want a new space encroaching on that. Yeah. So I think these things come back down to some basic human behaviors sometimes, and then...

[34:57] Sarah: just connecting...

[34:57] Jack: Just connecting, working out what it, what it is that makes people just feel good in different spaces. Yeah. It‘s not so different maybe to a physical space. How do you make people feel comfortable? How do you make them feel welcome? Like they‘re contributing, like they‘re valuable members of that new space.

[35:12] Sarah: Almost like first principles of getting to know people and making, helping people feel safe in a space as well.

[35:18] Jack: Yeah, exactly.

[35:21] Sarah: Jack, I have one more question for you.

[35:23] Jack: Yeah.

[35:24] Sarah: You have a magic wand for a day. And you can change the legal industry. You have three wishes granted. What are they?

[35:32] Jack: Three wishes. Wish one: I think is I wish lawyers, so many law students go into the law wanting to change the world and then they end up doing work but forgetting about like the architecture of the system. I wish that more would keep that in mind that this system we live in, it‘s like such an artifice.

[35:50] It‘s made up by people. It can be changed by people. I think just like that constant introspection. I wish people would like, wish lawyers would bring that to their everyday life. Their everyday work. The question is this how I want this system to work? And do I want to be a part of it in this way? And if not, can I change it? That would be really cool. I wish lawyers would be a little bit just like scientific in their methodology, just like having hypotheses.

[36:15] Setting up experiments, testing those. Discarding the ones that you know don‘t work pursuing the ones that do. I find that there‘s a lot of intuition in legal practice and it‘s built on like decades of experience and a lot of rigor in the way that the practice works, but it still is a little bit of an intuition.

[36:34] And science and the scientific system grows because there is just this rigorous understanding of how hypotheses are put forward, how they‘re tested, and then, peer reviewed basically. And those that, pass the bar are built on top of. And I think that the lack of, the lack of that sort of approach broadly in the law. I suppose the courts do work like that, but just individual practitioners bringing that sort of scientific methodology would allow the industry to keep building on top of itself maybe a little bit more quickly and a little bit more with some, with a little bit more direction.

[37:14] What‘s a third wish that I would have?

[37:18] I can‘t think of a third wish.

[37:22] Sarah: It‘s the, your one on the second wish around the law being quite intuitive. I‘ve heard it described that way.

[37:28] Jack: Yeah.

[37:29] Sarah: And I find the scientific method an a really interesting insight that you have because there‘s something in the ability to let an experiment run and not know the answer before it‘s run requires a level of, I think, courage and vulnerability.

[37:48] And brave and bravery. Similar to courage. Yeah. But also resilience, that you can‘t really be attached to the outcome.

[37:56] Because it might not be the outcome that you want, but you just okay, learn from that and keep going.

[38:02] And I wonder if that is not too popular in the legal profession. That idea.

[38:09] Jack: Yeah, I think you‘re right. I think that anchoring to the idea of certainty is really important. I think that certainty is an illusion because I think that often like the more precise you become with language, in some ways, the more opportunity there is for people just to pick.

[38:30] And argue over what that precision meant. And so I think the idea of precision uncertainty is just an illusion. And I think letting go of that illusion and embracing the idea that the world is a little bit probabilistic in the future is inherently uncertain would be a really positive thing.

[38:50] Sarah: I love that. That‘s really, yeah. That‘s really interesting.

[38:55] Jack, this has been a wonderful conversation. We could go down so many more tangents and speak for a very long time. We could thank you for sharing your story and your perspective. Thank you so much. You have brought for having something really unique to the podcast.

[39:08] Jack: It‘s been really fun.

[39:08] Sarah: Cool.

[39:16] 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.

[39:32] 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. This multidisciplinary life wouldn‘t be possible without the support from the wonderful guests who share their stories and perspectives, as well as the brilliant multidisciplinary team who helped me bring these important stories to life.