Richard Holbeach on why it's always about the people, never about the expertise

Legal human

Episode: Richard Holbeach, general counsel and company secretary of Healthscope.
Run time: 46:15

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 so grateful to be able to speak to Richard Holbeach, general counsel and company secretary of Healthscope.

Richard, thank you so much for joining me. Off air we've just been talking about the pressures on you at the moment and healthcare generally. I just really appreciate you giving us this time.

Richard Holbeach: Very welcome, Anthony.

AK: So, I just want to start actually by drawing on the complexity of that system in which you're working as a lawyer, and so you're a human lawyer, but you're in a broader system. And what are some of the complexities, challenges, but some of the things you find interesting about the system in which you're operating as a lawyer?

RH: Healthscope is a hospital group. We have about 40 hospitals, and we run it on a hub and spoke model. So effectively, the hospitals have a lot of independence to run their own hospitals. The hospital CEO, we call them GMs, run their own hospitals, and then they can seek help from the centre, the corporate office - we call it the support office. If they need support in certain things, but also if we want to scale certain processes and procedures on a national level, we do it from the central office there. So it's a really interesting culture, having a hub and spoke model, particularly in healthcare, which is just extraordinarily change averse, as people, like it's a … the most confronting thing I found coming from other industries into healthcare was how solution-focused people are, and therefore equally, how change averse they are because they're biased to quick decision-making. Because it's high, high risk in those surgeries, they're comfortable with the way they've done things in the past, and they don't like change.

AK: And do you find that translates to other aspects of the system, so they're carrying that across?

RH: Absolutely, absolutely. I think the, the thing most people struggle with when they come from outside of healthcare is an assumption that they can move things in a very consistent way in different environments. They can apply a process that is an efficient process in one hospital and then apply it equally successfully in other hospitals, whereas in reality, people don't like doing that that way. And it plays out in really sort of unexpected ways. So for instance, before COVID we, I came from a corporate and I said to my boss, I want to work flexibly, and that's just table stakes for me. And he said, sure, definitely. But as it turned out, he was deeply uncomfortable with flexible working, like just, like the idea that I might not turn up to work on a Monday. It was just beyond him, and it took COVID to change that. So, most hospitals still insisted everyone, regardless of role, IT, they had to work in an office. And it took years for that change to sort of find its way through.

AK: It's interesting you're picking up there an assurance that something is okay, and then the behaviour can be quite different. So there's an assurance that it's okay, but then you're picking up behavioural signals or other signals that suggest that it wasn't okay.

RH: He clearly wanted it to be okay. He clearly wanted to be cool with it.

AK: Yeah.

RH: And he was like, he'd obviously received feedback. He was a bit old-school, or he knew he was and like, I think mainly from his children. But he could, I could just, he didn't know how to speak to me when I wanted to work flexibly. And, and I could hear him stumble over his initial reaction to say no. But look, actually, full credit to him. We got on really well. And he went on the journey, as we all did in COVID, and was forced to do it anyway.

AK: Coming to your function, I mean, how many lawyers in your team, what sort of…?

RH: So I've got four lawyers in my team. I also have risk and compliance and company secretarial as well.

AK: What do you, how do you describe the purpose of your function, your team in that broader system? What role do you play?

RH: So the broader system's role is patient care, right. We're there for the patient. We're there to help patients. The actual delivery of that patient care requires a whole lot of different and less clinical things. Things like building, construction, governance that's not necessarily clinical governance. There might be sort of governance against sort of privacy data standards. So my team is sort of really split into what I describe as two sort of functions. One is help the day-to-day at the hospitals, because what comes out of hospitals, it's just a new challenge every day.

And if the legal team ends up getting a call, the hospital CEOs are so competent to be in that role. Like, they've seen everything. Like just the most bizarre things happen in our hospitals. So if they end up having to call you, just like, I just don't even know what to do. And so very often, the phone calls are, you're helping them. They're almost coaching sessions. You don't know the answer either, because it's not necessarily a legal problem, but they're calling you because you're a lawyer, so you've got a brand of comfort that you can give them. You tend to be risk averse. They know once you've said something, that they can sell that up the chain because legal said it was okay and actually, you know how they're conservative. So there's probably, there's a large volume of my team that deal with those, sort of a larger volume of less complex matters. And then there is the sort of existential strategic matters to do with the funding of our business. How does a private hospital work when our costs are going up by 8% and our revenue's going up by 2%? What do we do to renegotiate that? Can we bring costs down in a way that's that's structural? Can we get our revenue up in a way that is strategic and sustainable, that, you know, people can also afford to pay? So the team is very focused on helping the hospitals run smoothly. And secondly, strategically as a hospital system, ensuring there is actually a viable funding and operating model for that hospital system.

AK: The obvious question that occurs to me is, how many hospitals are you talking about?

RH: About 40.

AK: And you've got how many people?

RH: Four.

AK: So how do you deploy that resource?

RH: Very carefully [laughs]. Very!

AK: In a sustainable way?

RH: The single biggest battle is actually deployment of resources. However, it's actually helped enormously by the cultural bias of healthcare, which is sort of the quintessential nurse who just doesn't have time for anyone's crap and just makes solutions, makes decisions, and moves on with their lives. That bias means you get a lot less questions than you might otherwise would, because actually, the people in the business are used to solving problems. And unlike a corporate where you're told, oh no, you need to get marketing involved in that, you need to check IT security. Healthcare doesn't operate like that. They don't have the money, they don't have the time.

So there is that bias of, I'm going to solve this problem myself, which means very often things that should have come to the legal team never do. So actually that self-corrects. That obviously creates its own problem in itself. But you're so busy dealing with the volume that you have with four people that you don't worry about that very much.

AK: So, what's interesting in the way you're talking is, I sense that your team, as with any team in a social context or even a context like this, you're adopting or are expected to adopt cultural norms out of the system. And this system seems to have very strong sort of cultural norms around stoicism or resilience and competence. I'm hearing that there's a real focus on competence, capability. So presumably that means that if it does come to you and it's been filtered through this competent workforce, solution-focused, it can also sometimes be very serious and urgent by the time it gets to you.

RH: Yeah. The things that tend to come to my team are either, other people in the corporate office perhaps not doing their job, and they just get us to do it, or things that are literally so odd or extreme that the hospitals need to send them to us. And I think the, very often what you're doing in the second lot of, articles or sorry, the second lot of problems is actually helping, the sites to work their own way through a problem. Often it is a legal matter. Often it might be a, a doctor behaving poorly. It might be an injury on site, you know, other things like that that are genuinely legal. But very often it is grey, whether this is legal or not. But the mere fact that it's made its way to us means it's important to someone important, if that makes sense.

AK: Okay. So, I just want to get down to the last sort of layer of this sort of human system that you're in and that you and we often talk about, being a lawyer, and it's something that's really about identity and more than just role, comes to define us as a person. What does being a lawyer mean to you? How do you define that?

RH: I'll define it in the opposite, which is when I wasn't a lawyer. So when I was in an energy company, I had an opportunity, was asked to basically be a GM in People and Culture, and I did organisational effectiveness for a year. So I wasn't a lawyer for a year, and I hated it.

I've never learnt more about anything, like it was in many ways the most important year of my professional career because of what I learnt outside the legal team. But what I didn't have and turned out was actually really important to me was the, the branding of a lawyer and the status of a lawyer. And I would have always convinced myself I was not a status-driven individual until suddenly that status was taken away, and I was questioned about things that I was best placed to answer.

And I realised when you're a lawyer, you don't get questioned by peers about legal things because they don't expect they know anything about law. They might not like the answer you're giving them, but they might challenge you on that. They don't necessarily question you anywhere near as much as when I was in People and Culture, where everyone reckons they know people, everyone reckons they know marketing, that old bikeshedding law of triviality. So what ends up being important to me as a lawyer is, I like the status. I wish there was a, like, more humble answer than that. But actually, if I'm being honest, it probably is that. I like the seat at the table it gives me. And when I say that, I don't mean in that case as a status point of view. I mean you get, you get involved in really hard questions and intellectually challenging questions that are important, that you can provide a view on that others can't provide. Not because you're any smarter than them; very often the opposite is true, but because of the world in which you've been trained and the way you think, you can provide input. And so long as you're in the right team and that inputs value, that is just incredibly rewarding.

AK: If I'd asked you that question when you first started as a lawyer, what would be different?

RH: So I think if you'd asked me when I first started as a lawyer, I definitely wouldn't have given you a status answer. Intellectual curiosity. You just see everything as a lawyer. Like it is, it's an incredibly broad practice. There's no, one of the interesting counters you have in healthcare versus when you're a lawyer is, if someone asks me about tax, I go, oh I don't know much about tax or criminal law. No, I'm not a criminal lawyer. Every doctor thinks they know everything about every type of medicine.

And it's quite sort of startling because the first thing every lawyer will tell you when asked a tax question is, I'm not a tax lawyer. And so one of the values of when you are a corporate lawyer as I am, is you just see everything and everything's a new question. Everything is, I don't really know the answer to that. And I love that. I love that. When I was a junior lawyer, I loved - I found it freeing to be like, oh, my God, I'm the dumbest person in this room. Everyone around me knows more than me. And because I had, like, maniacal self-confidence, that wasn't confronting for me, that was like like, oh, this is the best. This is like, this is just, this is a great opportunity. And that's what I loved about being a lawyer. And I still got listened to.

AK: And so it shows up as curiosity, and the way you're talking, I think, I'm just interested in what you see as some of the constraints around the way we look at ourselves as lawyers and our participation in those genuinely complex situations. You seem to be a bit of an outlier in this respect. But what if it's not legal? You've talked about how we sort of naturally constrain ourselves and our role definition to our expertise. And if you put that alongside other executives, they can accommodate a broader remit without needing to be an expert in every element of it.

RH: It's the, you know, it's the danger of the sort of subject matter expert, and the, I think the first, the most important thing I've learnt during my career is, it's all about the people. It's not about the expertise. Everything is about the people. When you, when you think you're selling expertise, very often you're not. You're selling comfort. When you think you're explaining the risks, very often you're not actually explaining anything because you've actually misunderstood what they, the way they understand or the way they work or the way they're hearing, and so I think an ability to navigate a landscape where, you've got people who think differently, people who might have had a bad day or who hadn't had a bad day. People who are a bit confronted. People from different cultures or different personality types, you have to constantly be aware, and I don't think just lawyers, but everyone has to be constantly aware of those externalities and how the way you present into those externalities changes things in order to do the job that either you're being paid to do or you're being, you feel you need to do, and they're often two different - they're often two different things. Like very often, I'm asked to give legal advice, but actually what the business needs is encouragement to take a bit more risk because they're thinking about things perhaps the wrong way. They're looking to say no, when actually I think maybe, maybe we need to do this. Like maybe this is a risk we need to take. And so in that case, if I give the technical legal advice saying, look, this is likely, this is likely to be illegal, the answer is going to be - great, let's not do it. Versus look, maybe there's a way we can do this. It won't be low risk, but maybe we need to look at it, and delivering that in two different ways to two different people can get a better outcome. And very often you just need to judge the room in terms of how you deliver it.

AK: Well, we could have a whole podcast on that, I think. What are you, what are you attending to in making that strategic decision? But then what is the role of the needs of the individuals and the people in making that decision?

RH: I once gave a really important strategic advice a couple of years ago, and it was absolutely technically correct. And then three months later, everyone's recollection of that advice was a direct opposite of the words I used and the words in the writing on the paper. The words I used, and the advice was - this is high risk and really dangerous. What everyone remembered was, Richard thinks it's okay. And I reflected on it, and it was because of the way I presented it. I didn't present it in an alarming way. I presented it in an understanding, I know why we're looking at this, and yet is, look, it's high risk. But I presented it to calm our CEO down, who I was worried was going to be criticised for having even been asked to do this. And all people remembered was the manner in which I presented, not the words.

AK: Fascinating. The other thing I've been reflecting on recently, and this isn't about me, I'm going to go back to you in a moment, but is expertise delivered through advocacy can be perceived to be self-interest. And you could be right, and you could be shouting it from the rooftops, and still people perceive because it's from your perspective, it's from your self-interest, in a sense. So that manner of delivery, is, is really nuanced. How did you learn to do that?

RH: Well, I got it wrong, remember? So…

AK: Well, yeah. All right. So, what have you learnt from that experience?

RH: It was, it was actually, it was really fascinating because, like, and I sat with our CFO, whom you met and we were talking about it, and she said, no, remember, you said it was fine? I said, no, I didn't. Look at the advice! And I resent it to her. And she just, she came to my office and she started laughing. She said, Richard, the advice is, you can't, we can't do it. And I said, I know. And so what I learnt was, how you deliver something is often more important than what you deliver. People, we get so caught up in the perfection of the words and the exact words of what we do. Whereas people don't have time to understand our world, they don't have time to understand the technicalities, and we can make them understand the technicalities. And perhaps I should have, in this particular circumstance. But people shortcut their judgment on whether there's a legal risk based on the knowledge of you as a person and the sort of overarching impression they get from what you're saying, how are you saying it, the way you're presenting. And I clearly had hit that intersection of what they knew of me and how I was presenting was the lasting impression I gave, was it was all OK. Now that could well have been different a day after I had given it, but I can tell you three or whatever it was six months after I had given it, that was the memory.

AK: So the sense I'm getting is that your measure of success is not the delivery of the advice, it's the receipt. And it's not just the receipt, it's the intent. You've got to assess the, that there's an alignment of intent.

RH: It's not so much, did I tell you the right thing? It's, did you as a result of what I've told you, make the right decision?

AK: Yeah.

RH: Like if I'd told you the right thing, but you made the wrong decision, afterwards in my mind, then I've failed in my advice. And when I say the wrong decision, I mean like the decision I didn't want you to make, then the thing I was trying to do failed. Sometimes you give advice and you say, I'm not best placed to act on this advice. You genuinely, you do what you need to do. I think we should do this, but…

AK: Well, it's actually a great segue into, I mean, this has been so interesting so far, but what I really wanted to talk about today was, we hear a lot about the opportunities and the, and the disruptive potential of enabling technology, generative AI in particular, and the promise to in-house counsel, general counsel, I think of the product as it's being offered is that it will reduce the volume of what we call BAU or low-value work, and it will free you up in your capacity to do more valuable things. The topic of this podcast is really, what are those more valuable things? It's sounding to me like a lot of what you're doing at the moment, certainly at your level, is not really about the advice. We've just had that conversation. It's not about whether you're right or not. It's whether your message is received. But I'm just interested in your take on what, what is that higher value role? How much of it is, is amplifying stuff you're already doing and how much of it is genuinely new? Is it emergent?

RH: I mean, it always cracks me up, gen AI and all those tools because if my team is doing something that gen AI could be doing, they shouldn't be doing it. Like by definition, because it's such a small team and we have so many responsibilities, we should auto triage well above a capability of generative AI right now. And as a general rule, we do. So...

AK: Can I just ask for clarification, what do you mean by auto triage?

RH: Well, like auto triage, I mean, in the sense of, not even look at that. Like it shouldn't even be coming to us. Like, if it's so minor in a way that, like, can you write us this letter? We shouldn't be doing it. We're too, we're too precious a resource in a constrained environment that, things that are that far down the chain, from on a value chain, we shouldn't be doing. But of course we do do them. We were looking at ways whereby, you know, I can say I don't want to do this stuff. But at the end of the day, some things are actually important that you help someone along with even though it's not really your job. Writing letters is the classic one. Every lawyer gets asked to write letters that aren't legal because it's words and lawyers do words. Things like, gen AI summaries of advices as a first cut, they're actually excellent. So if I'm writing a letter to the Board now that attaches an advice, I will actually do gen AI to do a summary of the advice for an email. Now, because it's the Board, I've read the advice obviously, but that's a scary email. It's always scary writing to Boards, so that email might take me 40 minutes to draft as I get it right. That goes down to about ten minutes with gen AI. That's an incredibly valuable tool because I know already whether it's right or wrong, because I read the advice and I know, but I get a first cut at the table, and that's where it's super, super powerful is the, the first cut of things. But as a general rule, because we are so impoverished from a legal support perspective, we don't do the low-value work, or we shouldn't be doing the low-value work anyway. We just should be saying no.

AK: So I get the sense then, that a tool that actually does low-value work might have an unintended consequence of having you absorb more of it and avoid the real conversation, which is, this shouldn't be done. It's below the materiality or risk tolerance. It's not necessary.

RH: By nature of the fact that lawyers deal with documents, and everything these days is a document, there's always that creeping movement from being a centre of legal excellence to just a centre of excellence. We'll get a lawyer to do it. Like the CEO, every CEO I've worked with does this - just get the lawyer to do it, because they'll just do it right. And they don't want to have to go back and recut things. And so you're saving, you're saving the CEO time. And that's actually really valuable. But the danger with that creep is you start doing more and more. You create this expectation. The system moves around you to incorporate you into more and more things, that is actually not valuable for your resources when it comes to what the Board is actually paying you for, which is really signing off on legal risk at the company.

AK: And you become the office of doing stuff.

RH: Yeah, you just do stuff.

AK: I notice that you haven't yet answered the question. What is the…

RH: Feels on-brand!

AK: What, what is this… it sounds like you're so constrained in many respects you're already there.

RH: Yeah.

AK: At least that's your aspiration, is that your whole team would be doing would be working in this high-value work.

RH: Yeah.

AK: So maybe the question is if we could just take that down to the next level and describe what is that work in a bit more detail? What are the behaviours, the orientations, the mindsets? And to some extent you've covered this in your introduction. But what's your expectation of a lawyer, for example, as coming into your team and from the supply chain, for example, and you want to induct them into the way that we do things. What are you emphasising in the way you describe it?

RH: So the most important thing that I end up having to emphasise, because it goes against the grain of a constrained environment, is if you spend one day a month at a hospital and do nothing but speak to that hospital, walk around that hospital, and you lose a day of work, that is so much more valuable than a whole week of legal work you would otherwise have done, because a constrained environment, it does, look two things. One is it builds relationships that you would never have. And people do talk. You build the credibility of understanding what it's like in a hospital. They're crazy places. They're amazing. What we expect people in hospitals to do, our nurses, our orderlies, our catering staff, is an extraordinary thing. You can't be part of a healthcare company unless you understand that. And so, that is the opposite of what most people expect they have to do in a constrained environment. They expect us to be more efficient, produce more things. But actually that leads to an inability to triage effectively, because you don't know what's actually important to this person. You don't know what actually matters in a hospital group, you can't put two and two together. And so that actually tends to be, I lean into that because of the natural bias of most lawyers, which will be, come in, be technical, and think time spent at hospitals is probably a bit wasted and a bit indulgent.

AK: And are there other constraints to them orientating to the system in that way?

RH: You have to be, you can't be risk averse in a hospital group. Like it is, it's quite fast-paced. Things are wrong all the time and you have to be comfortable with that. You have to know that I can't fix these five things over here that I've seen and that you've told me about, because I've actually got to focus on these things here. We've had a number of lawyers really struggle with that. Or they want to spend two hours perfecting something important when myself or another lawyer might spend five minutes and they will have - we will get this and we will say, think in our own mind, this is important enough for me to look at, but only for five minutes, and we'll do it. And that becomes incredibly important. That's another thing that is harder to train, but you can absolutely train that.

AK: And going back to the introduction, that situation you found yourself in where the message wasn't landing. I sense that there's also paying attention to different things. It's not necessarily how right the advice is. It's have you assessed? It's receipt. And I don't see that that is going to be solved, the second half of that is going to be solved with technology enablement. The first might be; the second is still up to the human-to-human interaction, empathy, understanding, seeing the emotional cues, have I, are we on the same page?

RH: We had an incident where a man had gone into one of our hospitals to have an operation done, and it ended up taking a day less than expected. And he wanted half his money back, because he wasn't insured and he paid it upfront. And we explained it all to him at the start. He came back and he was constantly verbally abusive to our Director of Nursing, who had to come out and protect the front of staff. And then he put a claim in one of the administrative tribunals for this amount of money. I think it was like $1,000. And it made its way through my team, and it made its way to me. And I said, I looked at all the correspondence, and I said, we're just going to pay the 800 bucks. And unfortunately, a junior member of my team relayed that, and fair enough too, I hadn't told them not to, but she didn't realise that what she just relayed was, we're just going to pay the 800 bucks - the way it would land is, this man won. This man was a bully and a horrible man, and had won. And I said to them, I immediately called the DoN and she was quite upset. And I explained, I said, look, this is why, I've seen this behaviour before. I've seen it. This has got a real risk of becoming obsessive and much bigger. I'm reading correspondence and I've literally seen this type of thing last for years before and it become much worse. And for the amount of 800 dollars, I think it's worth this. But I know, I know it just feels like, he bullies and he wins. I know it feels that way, but I want to explain this is why. And that phone call was so important because she was, I discovered afterwards, in tears when she got the email from our junior lawyer saying, no, we're not, our advice is we should just pay it. Can we process it? And that's the difference between having been on a site and watched what people have to deal with in a hospital and knowing how it's going to land, versus being behind a desk and processing a transaction.

AK: I sense, and I don't want to attribute this to the listeners, I'm sitting here thinking, you're the general counsel and you're taking that time. So you're obviously valuing that above all the myriad of other things you could be doing. Why was that so particularly important to you?

RH: Because they're people. It's a people problem. And I, I knew how that would have felt for someone doing a very hard job. I think it's, the worst thing in the world is where you make someone feel bad about themselves or feel bad, and if I can make a phone call so that they don't feel bad, that's an incredibly important thing. And I don't care whether they, this was a Director of Nursing, but I don't care if they were a graduate. Like if that phone call stops someone - you might have ruined their day, ruined their week even - and you can do that, you can stop that with a five-minute phone call, make the five-minute phone call. An email would have taken just as much time. But people, people appreciate the effort. And that's the thing generative AI will never do. The human, that human interaction and understanding people's emotional response, people's… making people feel valued or making people feel better about themselves or helping them rationalise through a difficult situation, that's a human job, a person can do that. And the fact that a person takes their time to do that is often in and of itself just as important as the message you're delivering.

AK: It's so interesting from my perspective, my lived experience. My mother was a nurse and my sense is they're taught the same thing.

RH: Absolutely.

AK: Care is in moments of intimacy, connection.

RH: Yeah.

AK: It's not in the technical activities. It's, do they feel cared for?

RH: We have private hospitals that are often older. And the walls aren't that great. But all people talk about is the care they receive, the clinical care, the nursing staff, the woman who brings them their food in the evenings. And that's why people stay in healthcare.

AK: I can only imagine reactions you get from lawyers who join your team for the first time, and you're telling them that. And then they see you do that. And I suspect that in their mind, this has got nothing to do with law or being a lawyer. So what is the, how do we - how do you develop? You've touched on this already. You're always one or two steps ahead of me. But how do you develop not just the capability, but the prioritisation?

RH: Yeah.

AK: The switching?

RH: Most people want to do it. Usually what you're developing is the permission to prioritise that way. You're actually developing them to understand, my boss will think that's a good thing to do. I should do that. Sometimes you do things you probably shouldn't do, things that are below your paygrade, because you want to help someone in a bind. So the rules we set about triaging and don't write letters, you sometimes have to be a little bit flexible with them because maybe, one, your client is going through a tough time or like, you just want to help them. And I think the most important thing that I can help them with is knowing that it's okay to make those judgments. We would probably make different judgments at each time, but the most important thing is, you actually, you're helping people. You're not helping systems. And like, risk is important too. A lot of the more transactional stuff is actually really about people, not about enterprise-level legal risk or whatever else. And it's always better off delivered not necessarily via a phone call, but often with a phone call. The volume of work, we can't do phone calls most of the time. And quite frankly, a lot of our clients don't want phone calls. But if it's tricky or it's difficult, pick up the phone because it's often really valued, or visit them face to face.

AK: Again, what I find so interesting the way you're talking is that this human component is such an important element of the, of the judgment algorithm, sort of like the, I suspect that most lawyers would believe that the criteria for making a judgment is legal complexity, legal importance, risk importance. And now you're layering in another element of judgment, another contributor to judgment, which is actually more important, which is how is the human going to experience this?

RH: Yeah. And look, I don't, I don't think I should overstate, because it is always legal risk and legal complexity is the triaging of matters and size, because we are - we're paid to do a job, and that job is really important for the company. There's definitely an element of who's important. So sometimes something you want to do, you do do because of who's important. And that is absolutely true.

AK: Yeah. Pragmatic.

RH: Pragmatic. It tends to be, where the people element comes in tends to be at the bottom end, which is I'll do this for you.

AK: And I guess not just because you're on the Legal human podcast, but because you're trying to redress a balance, I don't imagine you've got any difficulty building an algorithm out of legal risk and risk to the business. You're bringing it to the attention of people who are orientated that way. And saying, also consider this.

RH: Yeah, yeah.

AK: And how do they respond?

RH: It's fascinating, just wildly differently. So, some, one of my lawyers who's just incredible struggles with anything other than the algorithm. Yeah. And so, like, when she will say to me, but why did you do that? Because, like, by your own definition, that was low risk. And low risk and low importance. And I was like, 'oh, I had ten minutes. I like her, it was fine'. And sometimes the opposite is true. Where I have, another one of my lawyers. He spent hours on something that was just not important, but the person he was helping was just really upset by it. And that would have been okay, except his job for this week was so important. I had to say to him, you can't, like this is going to our CEO and it's got to have first draft done by tomorrow. You can't let yourself be distracted by this. And he said 'oh, but you said'. And I was like, yeah, I did. I did say, I 100% did. So it's a messy, it's a messy human judgment. And it's one of those things that you find, you find your right balance through. And the algorithms, they only help you so far. They definitely help you in the very important stuff. But probably not the rest.

AK: It sounds to me you're talking about this a lot in your team, right? Because otherwise they're going to follow your behaviours. And that's going to be as confusing as, because they're not going to be able to make sense of it, because you're saying there's a discretionary element of this, it's genuinely judgment.

RH: Yeah. And you're not going to make sense. That's exactly what they say to me.

AK: So you've got to be really explicit. But at the same time, it's explicit about the…

RH: The judgments.

AK: Discretion.

RH: Yeah, exactly. And we do talk about it a lot because I think the danger with a team, with a small team with a very high workload, is you spend your entire time on the dancefloor just doing, and you never spend any time self-reflecting on whether you're doing the right stuff. Are you doing it the right way? Should we change it? So, we deliberately set time aside too, and one of my team members is fantastic at setting time aside for us, saying, I think we need to do this differently. And what's fascinating is she's the one who hates her job a little bit. And that's her superpower. Her superpower is…

AK: Things irritate her.

RH: Yeah, yeah.

AK: And that's the stimulus for creativity and innovation.

RH: It is amazing. Whereas one of my other team members who is just extraordinarily efficient, and, you know, quite a very, vertical area of expertise, her strength is doing and just doing so much. But she struggles thinking about different ways of working. And I'm, I'm more, much more in the other camp of, I like to find ways that I don't work. I like to find ways where I don't have to do things. Sort of laziness. Actually laziness. It's like, how can I not do this? Is how I describe it. Neither way is correct. Neither way is the right way. You need, you know, just a diversity of both ways. You need that friction. You need people to work in different ways, and most importantly, you need them to value the different ways of working.

AK: In each other.

RH: In each other. Yeah.

AK: It's not a homogeneous set of criteria. But you're also using the language of strength, so you are orientated to them as a bundle of strengths.

RH: Yeah.

AK: That are different to somebody else's strengths. How did you learn to do that? Was it your brief time in HR and organisational effectiveness?

RH: No, it's just wild optimism. I just don't like judging people. Like everyone's trying to do their best most of the time. Very often people's, what we call development areas or derailers, are overplaying of their strengths. And we have this sort of thing that always drives me mad when I see it, is where we try and manage people's development areas as if they're ever able to change them. You can't like, you can't tell me, Richard, you're great. You just, you're great with people, but sometimes you get a bit too emotional. I'm like no, that's why I'm great with people. You know? I can't, I can't do those two things differently. So don't tell me about something I can never change. I already know it. I don't need to be reminded of it.

AK: This culture you seem to have created around open dialogue around, essentially performance but it's really about how we're working and giving clarity to role and all sorts of things. Is that also something that you've adopted from the context, because that's critical in delivering patient outcomes, not done consistently, but it's an aspiration in that system? Or is it something you brought into that system?

RH: The patient care is why people stay in a very challenging environment.

AK: It sounds really challenging.

RH: It's really hard…

AK: The boundaries are unsustainable.

RH: It is, it is. It's like, everyone in healthcare right now is just struggling enormously and should be, have arms thrown around them to support them. Because it is, if you're in public or you're in private, it is just extraordinarily difficult. And yet we stay because it's important. It's hard, it's visceral. And, you know, it's something that matters and feels like it matters. So I think that's why I stay in healthcare. I think the way, I've always worked this way - it's just how I've, how I am. It doesn't suit a lot of CEOs. I remember having a conversation with my last general counsel, saying I'm not a general counsel for that CEO at the company. Even though that was at the time, the, the CEO was the single most impressive leader I've ever worked with. He was just amazing, but I was the wrong personality type for him. And that wasn't said with judgment. It just was true. That little human system of his leadership team that he would have had, I would have been the wrong fit.

AK: Last question really, and you've already again touched on this, I think. But as you consider the future state, the role of legal humans or human lawyers in that future state, H\how optimistic are you for the continued contribution of human lawyers to this system?

RH: Very optimistic. I think as the human part becomes more important because it's the differentiator, we'll only get better, right? We'll only get listened to more. The preference of the type of lawyer that comes through, I think will be much more diverse. Because, I work well with a particular style. Other people work well with different styles of clients, and the more and more that becomes an important factor, that cultural piece becomes an important factor, I think the better people will become at their jobs and influencing, and therefore the better the seat of the table will get.

AK: Richard as always, I could talk to you for hours, but I just do not want to hold you away from this work. It's so important. Thank you so much.

RH: Thank you very much.

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