Kirsty Harvison, former GC, on law as an emotional, embodied and relational practice

Legal human

Episode: Kirsty Harvison, former GC, on law as an emotional, embodied and relational practice
Run time: 40:55

Voiceover: This is a Lander & Rogers podcast, bringing you fresh perspectives on the legal and business landscape and life through a legal lens.

Anthony Kearns: Welcome to Legal human. A podcast focused on the role of human lawyers in the legal ecosystem and society more broadly. I'm your host, Anthony Kearns. I'm very pleased to welcome Kirsty Harvison, General Counsel and Head of Advisory for Your Call and Rely, but you've spent the bulk of your career as an in-house lawyer and a large proportion of it as general counsel.

Kirsty Harvison: Yep.

AK: Reflecting across those sorts of various contexts in which you've worked, as an in-house lawyer and then as general counsel, you know, what are your reflections on the relationship between legal and the human system? The legal function and you in your role and those sort of human systems around you? How would you describe the complexity and what's interesting about that interface between those things?

KH: Umm, big question Anthony. So I mean, I started my career in a law firm, you know, as a lawyer and then a senior associate. And I really moved into in-house, it wasn't actually a deliberate choice. It was more a circumstance, really. I had one child and then very quickly had another one. Two in two years, and I was in a big law firm and at the time…although they had all the policies around parental leave, which I greatly received, the structures weren't quite there to give me the flexibility that I needed at that time. So I just looked for a role that did, and it was actually an in-house role and it was a general counsel role at that time, but in a smaller organisation and I ended up staying for, you know, eight years and in that time the role and the business really grew.

So my reflection on there is that I think what I started out to do as a lawyer and what I thought being a lawyer was, which is having a very narrow skill set of expertise, providing advice and solving a specific problem, really changed when I went into a business because in the business, looking at their problems, and it was quite - I think it's quite a mindset shift too, to be in the practice of law in a law firm where everyone else is a lawyer and you are surrounded by like-minded people, and you understand what your job is and what success looks like, to then going in-house and being with a really diverse group of people, different pace, lots of competing demands and trying to sort of prioritise those demands and influence people that think differently from you, and trying to work out actually, what is my purpose here and what does success look like? You know, in the law firm you kind of know what your purpose is. You're giving some, you know, a piece of advice, advice on something. Success looks like a happy client and good billables. In-house, it was quite different.

AK: Have you seen those expectations evolve over your time in-house?

KH: Yes, and I also think part of the evolution is, the evolution of myself and growing, you know, growing in the role and seeing, viewing the role differently because of my own experience, expertise and real kind of journey of self-development, more professional studies. I don't know if it's what the business is wanting from lawyers, or it's what lawyers see that they can do that's changing.

And I think it's really different depending on which organisation you're in as well, and what is your operating environment. I've worked across businesses in industrial environments, in hospitality, in logistics. They're all quite different needs, and now in a software environment.

AK: And where you feel you've been most successful - how do you define that and what do you see as the enablers of that? What are the key things that need to be in place at the interface to make that work?

KH: Trust. Trust and influence. Yeah. Trust and influence. And I think it took a while to kind of work out what that is. You know, how do you get trust? How do you get influence? Again, you know when we're young lawyers in a law firm or even in a law firm, certainly in those junior roles, you're sitting there. Your role is really to research the law and write the advice and get that out. But then when you're in more senior roles and then certainly when you're in a business, that is not enough. You know, to actually influence decision-making, you've got to build these trusted relationships.

How do you go about that? There's, I think a very, very big piece in listening rather than advocating that we never learnt. And that to me is I think that's the big, big shift that I've really learned in myself, is holding back. There's temptation that we, not doing it now, but you know there is this temptation to jump in and tell them the answer or at least let everyone know that you are the smart person with the law degree.

I mean you talk about, Anthony, these attachments - one of the attachments to being right, that resonates really strongly. We got into the positions that we are in because we've studied really hard at school. We got the big fat marks in the final, you know, we got through law school - a very competitive environment - to get the good grades, to get into the big law firms, and then it's been a for a lot of us, a lot of competition rather than collaboration, and a lot of being attached to knowing and being an authority, which serves you to a point. But if you're really wanting to get good trust and engagement, you've got to do more than tell people the answers. You've got to listen deeply, so that you are hearing and learning more about what is the real problem? What is the thing that they're trying to solve?

I will add too, just on in-house, I think one of the great things in-house that we often forget is that we have a unique view across the organisation that other people just don't. So we will see, you know, property development and marketing. They're not talking to each other, but legal knows what's happening in both those streams. So when you ask the question about the evolving role of lawyers along the way, I think that's really a big one. Every business I have been in, doesn't matter what size they are, has silos, and in every business they talk about breaking down the silos. They never do. But lawyers are in the middle. They're often seeing them and are able to connect the dots in a way that other businesses can't, or business units can't or don't. And I think that's part of the evolving role of in-house as well, is that connection.

AK: So, I mean when you first came out of a law firm into an in-house role, it sounds like there was a really steep learning curve and some of that must have seemed quite disorientating - like, 'you're telling me that I'm now measured by different things?' And the other thing I'm hearing is that you're measured - you came to realise that you're measured by your impact, not on the quality of your output, so it's - 'have I achieved change? Have I influenced something?' It's also how you're measured. You're not measured because you're right, whether you're not right. It's not binary. You're measured on, 'did the organisation become more compliant, better in some way'? Is that fair?

KH: Yeah. Yeah.

AK: And you're also talking about curiosity and inquiry, because presumably that has to be first informed by interest. You have to be interested in things beyond the legal component. How did you realise that that was something you needed to be curious about? Were there any pivotal moments where you just sort of sat back and went - I'm paying attention to the wrong things here?

KH: What a gorgeous question. I don't - you know, on the spot I can't think of there being any pivotal moments where that, again, I think it was just evolving and it's probably part of that conscientiousness, that we know lawyers are high in conscientiousness. Part of that is how do we do this better, you know, whatever that look like, how can I add more value? How could I be of more service? And also how can you make your job as interesting and dynamic as possible? And part of that was the curiosity around seeking to understand the business better and what it was trying to do. I will say that that the flip side of that, though, is taking on too much responsibility. You know, and feeling that you know you're the person that's in the middle that's going to be the saviour, or is the only one that can steer the business where it needs to go. So, there's a flip side there. But your question I think, was when did you notice paying attention to the wrong things?

AK: Because I get the sense you sort of fell into in-house, right? It was a choice made not on your interest in being an in-house lawyer. It was on other factors.

KH: Yeah.

AK: And you found yourself in this really different context, measured by different things.

KH: Yeah.

AK: Was there a was there a mentor or a person that helped you realise that there's a different priority here?

KH: In in my very first in-house role it was actually the head of development. Shout out to Rob Whitwell, who you know - he's an engineer, and it was a property development enterprise, and he got me really interested in the business and how the business makes decisions. And so, I was at the start looking at definitely through the lens of, you know, I'm a lawyer. I've got to get these legal agreements right. But then looking at that broader, just the broader context in which we were operating and trying to think of a few steps ahead around where the business was going. What did the future look like? So it was those things, just engaging more broadly with the business and being in the business meetings, that were not just legal-related things, but were broader commercial decisions.

AK: At the risk of editorialising, it sounds like what you're describing is you then evolved to look at human needs in this situation. So what's important to this person may diverge to some extent from what's important to the organisation.

KH: So in one of my roles early on, a really significant joint venture, where joint venture parties were not always funnily enough seeing eye to eye. So that really - OK, when you talk about curiosity, that really started me thinking about, what are people's motivations here? What are their drivers? How can you - perspective-taking I guess, but a bit of, how can you also see things through their lens rather than holding very tightly to what I thought was where things needed to go? That was probably the start of that process. around.

AK: Is the origin of that rigidity the belief that you're right? And did you lose the tightness of connection?

KH: Yeah, not immediately, but yes. It's definitely, you know, I think this idea of intellectual humility, we all like to think we're intellectual. We've got intellectual humility. Often we don't. But really trying to just hold on to that idea of rightness more lightly early on, and seeing my role more around influence, you know, letting the business - understanding where the business wanted to go, but then framing it around the parameters where it needed to be, so making sure that it was in, obviously in what it's legally allowed to do.

AK: If you reflect back, right, to when you're in the law firm and you had these sort of, quite clear measures of success that weren't quite technical, legal output-related. Did you feel, were you interested in humans at that point and you were contained by that culture? Or is this being unlocked? Was this revelation for you personally when you came into this?

KH: I became much more interested in humans as I became more developed in my career, and I was in business, definitely. And I think whether this is part of adult development or it's actually from experience around coming to know myself more… possibly. But certainly my interest in wellbeing…I mean, when I'm talking about that, I mean around creating sustainable practices where people can thrive, that absolutely happened later and it happened through being in these leadership roles and seeing a lot of people not thriving. So then, yeah, certainly that deep interest in that happened later, but it was really through stepping outside of myself and developing some more empathy, and that deliberate shift from being really focused on competition to more actually on working better with others and creating an environment that I wanted to be in that other people could also function well in.

AK: Knowing you only that second part of - I find that quite surprising, that there was a a non-empathetic version of Kirsty Harvison at some point.

KH: Look, to give an anecdote, I mean my first child. I don't know if you know this already, but I went into labour at work. My waters broke at my desk. And to me, I look back now and think, how on Earth did that happen? That's a really good symbol of how disconnected I was with my own body. And so kind of driven, but just in the head, not in an embodied way.

AK: That connection with self or knowing of self, did that come before your curiosity in human systems, or are they sort of, you can't delineate it like that, you can't divide it like that? Was that necessary for you to find?

KH: Oh, I don't know. I mean, it's hard to spot these things in reverse, right?

AK: Yeah. So you've become so interested in this, you've studied it, right?

KH: Yes.

AK: So you didn't go off and do an LLM, you chose a different academic path.

KH: Yep, Yep.

AK: Tell me about that.

KH: So, yeah, I didn't do an LLM. I did a masters in applied positive psychology a couple of years ago. And my motivation for that was very much around, how do you create high performance workplace cultures? It was really around, increasingly I was asked to do more around the people side of things. But I always felt like I didn't have good frameworks around it to really lead that effectively, and I was just deeply, deeply interested in, you know we spend so much of our time at work. How do you create workplaces where people can do their best work? And yeah, so I did that masters and it was transformative, it's fair to say. I mean there are lots of things in there that you sort of think are common sense, but there were lots of other things in there where I just thought - wow, this is the piece of knowledge that I have been missing for a long time. So that was very much as I see myself now; it is much more around being interested in human systems and the role of context. How we show up is very much dependent on the systems that we're in, and who's around us and how they're operating. And it sounds obvious when you say it, I mean of course, but I don't think I really appreciated that until relatively recently.

AK: And the systems you bring in, life experience and the way you've been shaped?

KH: Yep, Yep, of course.

AK: So how do you apply that Masters of Applied Positive Psychology? What, you know, are you running programs, courses? How does it? How does it show up in your continuing practice as a lawyer? A lot of people would say, I can't see how that could be relevant to what I do as a lawyer.

KH: I think, you know, lawyers we tell ourselves we're sort of telling selling people law. But we're really selling comfort and security. We are all relational beings, but lawyers are… it's a relational practice. It's a relationship-based practice. So how we show up in that really affects the service that we provide to our clients. It certainly affects our teams. It's having an awareness of the boundaries that you can apply to yourself, your own thinking patterns, the way in which you speak or listen or attend to people. How it then impacts what they will appear with, your own emotional regulation - I think that's a huge one for all lawyers, particularly with our attachment to being right and our discomfort with big emotions that - I know you talk about that too, Anthony. But that was a huge one for me as well. You know, lawyers - we're told to be rational and emotions have no place in the law. But of course I've learned that, you know, we're not. We're not rational beings who sometimes feel; we're emotional beings who sometimes think.

It's quite a shift, but lawyers, you know, we're attached to that rationality. So you know, how does it show up? It shows up in lots of ways around that awareness, but also actually getting much more comfortable with the idea of emotions and the role of reflection, and those preventative strategies to stop burnout, but also recognising those behaviours in the people around you so that you can support them better to perform well.

AK: I love the way you describe that as, you know, emotional beings that sometimes think. I'm going to push you, right, because I think there's going to be people listening who, for example, just finished their law degree going - how on earth, with what I've just been told, a lawyer is, how on earth is all of this in any way relevant and useful? And the other thing I wanted to pick up on was - you talk about emotional regulation and then you go straight into talking about increasing our tolerance for strong emotions, our ability to work with emotional data. So when you say emotional regulation, you're not saying suppression.

KH: No, no.

AK: What do you mean by emotional regulation if it's not suppression?

KH: Yeah, I definitely don't mean suppression

AK: …Or entirely suppression. We need suppression from time to time.

KH: a big piece for me - regulation is actually that recognition, you know, like going into or just before this recording I was on a call that was fairly… you know, had some consequences attached to it. And just knowing, I could feel myself become heightened, I could feel my heart racing. I could feel my cheeks get a bit red, you know? And just knowing that that is the physiological, emotional response to a conversation that I found had some threatened consequence in it, and just knowing that. So that then the regulation piece is having a bit of a pause and taking a few deep breaths before considering the next step - that's what I'm talking about when I say regulation. It's not pretending it never happened and then going on, because at some point that emotion is going to come out somewhere. It's actually being able to notice it and pay attention to it. You know, in the same way that all of us have had a board member or a client or a senior partner, perhaps speak to us in a way that didn't feel great. It's well, how do you sit with that and recognise the impact it's had on you without it destroying you? Also, launching into a response that may not be the best response in the longer term.

AK: Interestingly, you see this as key to effectiveness, and in fact you were just describing a situation that I was witnessing where you came in and you realised that you weren't ready for this. But you went into a deliberate practice to prepare. I mean, that seems pretty useful as a practice, particularly if you're in a high-stakes role like a general counsel, and you may be going from one stressful meeting to another or you've got to move from a stressful meeting into a really tough conversation with one of your team about their wellbeing. How do you switch gears?

KH: Yeah. And when you're talking about a practice here, to be clear, it's probably 90 seconds. Like, we're not talking huge amounts of time. Something I want to circle back on too was, you said something about, you know, young lawyers or people who are studying now and come out and what does it mean for them and for practice? I know I did do my law degree last century, so I appreciate it's a while ago. But the thing I was reflecting on when you asked that, was I don't think we ever did any work where we were talking about this stuff. Where we were actually thinking about what it means to be a lawyer in practice. I don't remember ever having any kind of dialogue around client needs, trust, building relationships. It was all around - this is the law. This is the problem. Write an essay how you solve it. I don't know if the if the study of law has evolved since then, but if young lawyers are still predominantly, that's still the model, then then there is a huge gap.

AK: Yeah, which sort of brings us to what's really the stimulus for this podcast. And it brings us to this question I was wanting to pose to you, which is, you know, we hear so much in the profession about the impact, positive and negative of enabling technology, particularly generative AI. It does seem that what you've just described as an educational experience seems to be preparing people for exactly what AI promised to do. I imagine that makes people feel, you know, concerned, worried, anxious about to what extent is being a lawyer going to be constricted or changed or available to me? What is the work I will be doing? So in your mind, what you think about the evolving role of a lawyer that's truly technology enabled - let's assume for the purpose of the exercise we get to the point where generative AI can do all of those things and doing it better than us, we're no longer the best vessel for the accumulation and regurgitation of expert knowledge.

KH: Yeah. And we'd be naive to think that that's not just around the corner. So, none of us are going to have jobs. But that piece around, we know that AI is - I mean, at the moment it's trained on very general material, so it hallucinates a lot. It comes up with the wrong stuff, but we know it's going to get very sophisticated very quickly when it's trained on more complex legal information. We know that. What our jobs will look like in the future, I think is obviously hard to predict. And I just look back to the last 18 months, you know ChatGPT, everyone's using it now. It was only 18 months ago that it even arrived. And I know that because I was having, Christmas before last, one of the companies I work with now is a software company, so I was at Christmas lunch sitting next to one of the software engineers. And I had read about ChatGPT on LinkedIn or something, and so I asked this software engineer, Dom, what can you tell me about ChatGPT? And he very excitedly said, everyone's saying it's the biggest leap in technology since the internet came in. And to me that was like, OK right, I understand that now. I get how huge this is. And I've seen it watching the software developers - in 18 months they've gone from, you know, this tech didn't really exist, to rather than writing all the code, they're now - of course, they still know how to write code, and they're writing some of the code, but a lot of their job is blended with AI so that they are prompting the code. So the way they're engaging with it is they're asking questions, but they're getting the code. They're getting the ChatGPT to write the code, whereas before they had to do the manual labour of the code. So same sort of thing for lawyers, you know, before we would manually have to do all that searching through all the databases to get the answers; now we would just ask the AI the questions and the answers are going to come through. But you still need a level of training to understand when the AI is hallucinating and giving you the wrong answer. And you also need some level of knowledge to know what are the questions to ask so that you can get intelligent, useful answers.

So I think it's pretty obvious that that junior stuff is going to be done by AI more effectively. And the question, I guess, is how much time then do you spend junior in your career still doing that foundational work, because you'll need to have some level of knowledge and what that is to build on practice later. OK, so then what does become our job? What should we be doing? And you know, there's so many great things we can be doing. I mean, my context largely is in-house. So you know, I talk about it from that perspective. But you think - in-house lawyers, by and large, are incredibly intelligent - well, of course! [Laughs] Generally sort of well-trained, generally well-regarded, you know you they've done the job right, getting good trust across the business. And then there's this role that you can play in in helping businesses navigate complexity. And I think the thing we're seeing now, ESG is this much bigger issue across businesses. We've still got the ethical considerations around, not can we do this, but should we be doing this? Lawyers can play a real role in this. But I think we've got to, certainly the way in which we train our lawyers around what we think it is to think like a lawyer, and then also our own mindsets around what is our purpose as lawyers, that does need to shift a bit because technology is going to do that basic stuff.

AK: Is it that much of a shift, though? Because when I think about - going back to where you started when you started to describe the role, and particularly when you've been most effective in-house. I didn't hear you talking about doing a lot of the stuff that we're now talking about, which is the stuff that might be replaced by it. So, it's almost like that pulls you out of the real work, right? Once you've reached that point, the real work is relational. The real work is influence, the real work - so a lot of stuff you're talking about, if that's the aspiration or the career journey leads to that point…

KH: Hmm.

AK: …Isn't the work we're describing, like the coders, right, the coders now - what does it enable them to do? Where are they? Where is their focus?

KH: It's interesting, those guys, cause one of the tech teams, you know, sometimes I'm in the office and they're just out the front of me. And I when I watch them work, the way they collaborate, it's very different from how I've seen lawyers collaborate. I mean, like tech, they're talking about 'agile' and 'scrum' and all of that stuff. But you know, when you see them come together, the way in which they're operating - I don't know how much this has changed because of how their role has changed, but certainly they're very good at coming together, problem solving collaboratively, iterating and changing quite quickly to solve a problem.

AH: If we continue to think of them as an analogue, it's just occurred to me that they could be quite a good analogue. We think that, you know, young lawyers are coders. If what you're saying is right, that a lot of this work will disappear then presumably these teams have become a lot smaller. They're not recruiting as many people because they don't need them. Now I get the sense that's not actually the case. What they've done is they've integrated, they've become technology enabled, right? They've adopted the enablement and they can produce things more quickly. They can do things that are better because they're paying attention to other things.

KH: Yes, their focus is more on the user experience. So then they're thinking about, you know, they're still creating the same kind of software, but they've got a capacity to think about different elements of it in a different way, and maybe ahead of schedule because they're not doing a lot of the other base stuff. The base stuff is quicker.

AK: Yeah, but have they got smaller? The team's got smaller?

KH: No, this team is not. Well, it's growing. No, the team has not gotten smaller as a result of this. But the capability of what they're able to do, I think has shifted.

AK: And are they at the point now where they're recruiting for different capabilities? Or is it still…

KH: They will. That's probably just more about, that's probably more about the function of the growth of the business as opposed to….

AK: So I just want to invite you to challenge or to sit with one of the assumptions I think underpins what you were saying about development. I hear this a lot - there's still value in doing this sort of, what we could describe as low-value work because of its developmental opportunity. Is there? That's how we learned.

KH: I know, and I was about to say it's very hard to separate from your own experience. So although I was talking about all the, you know, the things that I found energising in my roles and the leadership to influence those things, I still spend a lot of time on the tools, you know, writing documents or negotiating contracts, those sorts of things. My current view on this, is I think it's very hard to know what questions to ask if you don't know what a good foundation looks like. How much time do they need to spend drafting iterations of contracts and those sorts of things? I don't know.

AK: And presumably this oversight or in this phase where it's somewhat unreliable, it's got to be quality tested. You need expertise to do that.

KH: Yeah. That. I mean, I think that is going to evolve very, very rapidly. Because you just look at in the last 18 months how much that technology has come, and that's from just being trained on general information. When it's trained much better on much more bespoke legal information, the quality of what it produces is going to be much better, of course.

AK: And you're also describing, I think there's a big emphasis at the moment on prompting, on our ability to instruct appropriately to get a better outcome. It seems to me that there's - in the context, if we're going to use it to generate legal advice, essentially prompting becomes technical. It's more technical. There's a technical input to that. Which we're going to need for a while, but ultimately we get to a point where we can insert the human problem we're trying to solve, or the complex problem we're trying to solve, and it will do that as well. Because I think there's a big emphasis at the moment on in terms of what's the developmental challenge here for us as a professional? It's still in the interface with technology, it's still about getting to the point where we're truly using enabling technology. But then what? What becomes the core of our education? What becomes the core of our development? Where is our focus?

KH: And this is this - I mean, Legal human is this podcast, right? This is this very human supply chain, it's these human skills. There's lots of our jobs that are going to change because technology will do it better. But it's ultimately this human interaction, this solving problems in a relational context. Selling comfort. You know, like actually having people feel comfortable, particularly with the increasing rate of ambiguity and complexity and volatility that we're experiencing. So what are those, you know, what are those skills? That, and I think this is a big challenge for all of us, but certainly for lawyers, is that getting comfortable with the ambiguity and the not knowing.

AK: Bringing us back to where we started, which is if your identity to some extent is defined by being a lawyer and that is largely around expertise.

KH: Yeah, very much expertise.

AK: And also other people on this podcast have talked about the status that comes from being perceived to be an expert. So do you just become another person who's just talking generally about human systems, change, where do you drive your status to be able to from time to time advocate from a position of expertise? Not that we never have to do that. Sometimes you are walking into a situation where you just have to say, guys, this is a bad idea. You're going to go to jail.

KH: Yeah, yeah.

AK: Now they have to believe that you know that at that moment… I don't know that there's an answer to this maybe in embedded technology. We haven't talked about that, but you know if this ends up being synthesised, it's part of us, our decision making…

KH: What do you mean, embedded technology?

AK: It's embedded device.

KH: Oh, yeah… far more sci-fi than my brain goes! It's an interesting question, that whole thing around identity.

AK: Who are we?

KH: Who are we?

AK: What is a lawyer? Maybe we can answer that.

KH: I was going to say, it's what we make it. But even now this, you know, say I'm a lawyer. What does it mean? I'm a lawyer, like I use it, you know? And it's a bit of a shorthand to - OK, well, they're trained. It's some kind of credentials. Is that any different from someone else saying 'I'm an accountant' or I'm some other profession?

AK: Uniform. I get on a plane. There's a guy or a lady who comes on with four pips on their shoulder, and I feel more comfortable. Because there's, I assume, a process of training that put them into that position to be able to do that and I can't.

KH: Yeah.

AK: For us though, it's often - we don't look any different necessarily to another human being. So it's in the expression of the expertise we derive, other than court where it's all the pageantry and uniforms and the artifacts that give trust to this system. So we rely heavily on that sort of brand trust. If you're in that firm, therefore, you must know your stuff.

KH: Yeah, it's a shorthand too.

AK: Any final thoughts?

KH: I think anyone who says the future of law is 'X' is - we just don't know. I mean, I really think we have to be comfortable in that not knowing, but also be confident that there is still very much a place for lawyers. What legal practice looks like is absolutely going to shift, of course. But I think there's still always a role for, you know, humans interacting with other humans on complex problems and solving issues. And also upholding the rule of law. Like that, fundamentally, is what we're here to do. And I think that role is, is also increasingly an important one. Particularly now we're talking about, you know, we're seeing threats to democracy, you know, organisations doing all kinds of misconduct. There's, I mean there, there's a huge role for that just in governance. What that looks like in terms of practice, who knows? But I think the actual role of lawyers, there will always be a critical role.

AK: As you know, that's why I love working particularly with in-house profession, because every day I meet professionals who take their superordinate responsibility really seriously. It's not tokenism, not something they say, it's something that they feel deeply as...

KH: As a duty.

AK: As a duty. That's a really attractive thing to be around, that sense of purpose beyond just doing stuff. You've also answered the last question, which is, what is your level of optimism about the emerging role of human lawyers in the legal ecosystem and society?

KH: I think, imagine a world where you didn't have to do all of the grunt work rubbish. Like, how phenomenal would our practice be then? So I mean, there is that role for technology there. We're really good, though, at busy work. Like that's that whole... It's hard to step away from the drafting the document, or from inadvertently proofreading marketing's copy, because they don't have their own people to do it. Or, you know, with those things that lawyers end up always doing, it's hard to step away from that. But, you know, imagine if our time could be spent doing those bigger things, how great that would be for, well, for the businesses we're in, for society broadly and then for ourselves as a practice and sense of achievement would be phenomenal.

AK: Well, I look forward to realising that with you. Kirsty, thank you so much for joining Legal human.

KH: My pleasure. Thanks.

AK: You've been listening to Legal human. To hear more Legal human. podcasts subscribe to the channel.

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