Richard Oakes on law as an energetic and intensely human practice

Episode 4: Richard Oakes on law as an energetic and intensely human practice
Run time: 34:42

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, podcast focused on the role of human lawyers in the legal ecosystem and society more broadly. I'm your host, Anthony Kearns. Today I'm joined by Richard Oakes at Legal Human. Welcome to Legal Human, Richard.

Richard Oakes: Pleasure to be here, Anthony. Thank you for inviting me along.

AK: I can't remember when it was, and we were just talking off the air about how long ago it might have been. But I remember you, meeting you outside an event of some sort, like a conference presentation or workshop you were about to do, and you excused yourself and said, 'I'd like - my practice is to do a meditation, to prepare'. And I found that fascinating. I had just started to practise myself, mindfulness meditation, and it was interesting that somebody in your role and the work that you do, which we'll talk about in a moment, would choose to do that. But I guess my question to you, my provocative question to you at the time was, have you ever thought about incorporating that into the work that you do? And I remember you saying, I'm not sure that the legal profession is ready for that particular aspect, but you thought it would be quite powerful. So you worked, at that stage, and I think you continue to work, at the interface between law firms and their clients. So, for want of a better term, it's in BD, in business development, but it's much deeper than that. Do you want to just talk a little bit about Ohten, your experience of working at that interface between law firms and their clients, and how you came to be doing that work?

RO: Yeah. I mean, just very quickly to pick up on that point about readiness and, and when I answered that question, that's a long, long time ago Anthony, about it is the profession… because at the time, we were experimenting with starting sessions with a meditation practice, 10, 15 minutes of guided meditation, and at the time I would ask a question, you know, how many people have done mindfulness or meditation? And you know, you might get one or two hands up in the room. I know if I ask that question, I do ask that question now, it's over half. So in itself, you can see how far people have come on this journey. My journey goes back a long, long time. I mean, I started working in this interface between law firms and their clients 25 years ago. And, in the early days, it was very much about, how do we grow the business? How do we drive profit? How do we, you know, so it was very hard. It was a very hard measure. And I came from retail, very hard tracking, return on investment, you know, if you spend something on business development, what do you get back at the hard measure? And in the early days working in law firms - and I've done most of my career working in or with law firms now, proportionately, with probably thousands of partners, hundreds of firms all over the world - you know, Harvard wrote a case study on our work because they said, you know, it's quite unique what you're doing because you're working from the inside out. They meant by that, you're working from the sort of heart and soul and mind, if you like, the spirit, if you want to call it something like that, of the human being, that is, that is the lawyer, the salesperson, the advisor. And the drive for that came from me noticing with my co-founder, in Ohten, probably as long as 15 years ago, how the levels of imbalance in the profession, like, you know, broken marriages, stress, heart attacks, strokes, bad diets, alcohol, like the level of dysfunction in the profession was significant. And I actually had a partner in a firm I worked for die at his desk. And that, that triggered this question: There must be a better way of being more human in the way we work together as human beings. Forget clients and not clients. But yeah, in firms with clients, surely there must be a better way of, you know, showing up that is less combative, stressful, that brings more balance to humanity. Like that was the real driving force. And that's what got us to leave our jobs, crazily, in 2009 after, you know, Lehman Brothers collapsed, to set up this business, Ohten, which then to ended up going all over the world advising all kinds of amazing businesses and leaders on this notion: How can we bring more balance, humanity, mutuality, care, compassion, empathy, mindfulness? How can we bring that into this realm of leading law firms, running client relationships, you know, making them successful but at the same time, recognising balance is very important. So that's sort of what drove, that's what drove it all. You know, the rest is history. We became, I think, one of the - I think we still are one of the few firms that advise and help, not just law firms, actually, we've helped banks and accounting firms and clients like Nike and all sorts of businesses, to bring this in. But predominantly it's been lawyers. Yeah. So that's probably why I'm here.

AK: It had quite a profound effect on my development, Ohten, at that time, At that time I had started, I had shifted from being a lawyer into OD and organisational design development, working with the amazing Andrea Bell. And this program came in to the firm I was at, at that stage through the BD team, through Paul Bonomy, and I found it astounding. You say you're working, or you've said it's been said that you're working, from the inside out in respect of the lawyers. I found you're working from inside out in so many respects, and I found the design fascinating, because you also - you sort of, I don't want to give too much away, but I felt like you were lulling these highly cognitive people into a belief that it would be a largely cognitive process. There were lots of SWOTs and lots of models and all those sorts of things, but at its heart, I saw it as essentially human, that -

RO: Yeah.

AK: You saw the relationship between the law firm partner and their client as essentially human. And you brought the clients into the process in an active way, but it was really an… I saw it as an exercise in empathy, however we describe that word, and it was very clever. It's designed in a very clever way. And I took a lot of that for my own practice. Not copied it, but I thought about that a lot.

RO: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. And it's become a, it's become more important, in my opinion, post-pandemic and like the disconnection, the disaggregation if you like, of the flow of energy. Because if you remember we used this, the Dan Siegel work on energy, like human beings are just exchanges of energy. Einstein said, if our visual apparatus was good enough, we could actually see that what we are is atoms and molecules vibrating in this flow of energy between us. And that energy has been really damaged by what's happened to society in the pandemic and post in, and the struggle to get back to some of that. And so I think it's, the other thing I would say as well is that in the design we also built in this really important aspect of also the energy flows inside a firm as well as up to the outside. And so seeing it as an ecosystem, seeing colleagues, leaders, clients, the customers of clients, you know, government, you know, seeing the ecosystem at work and, understanding… it's a bit like when Neo in The Matrix suddenly sees it, sees the matrix for what it is. And if you can see being human as being part of a system, a flow of energy, and being aware of that, that flow of energy and working with it. You know, it's like if you're a surfer, you know, you work with the wave, you understand the wave. And latterly, probably since you and I have met, I've done a lot more work on this notion of ecosystem and being part of the flow of energy and seeing it like that. And you're absolutely right, the genius of Ohten was the combination of Jim, my co-founder, who was brilliant on understanding the brain, the neuroscience, you know, as an academic, you know, PhD in organisational psychology, studied the system of law firms. And the reason the design was so, and it still stands the test of time now, it's still as powerful now as it was when we put it together, is it blends these two systems. You know, you could say left and right brain or whatever, or, you know, the - it blends these two systems of understanding the importance of intellect, knowledge, wisdom, but puts that in the context of relationships, mutual benefit, being part of an ecosystem, what's my role internally and with the clients to find balance, success, and do that in a way that creates the sense of togetherness. Like we're in this together. And it taps beautifully into both the intellectual prowess and brilliance of some of the best lawyers. I mean, you know, these are some of the best people I've ever come across intellectually, they're brilliant. And when you allow them to bring in the other side of themselves into their roles, you know, you get truly amazing collaborations. And you get truly amazing results. And yes, it made lots of money for our clients, and that was a byproduct and was always a byproduct, because the question was, with your client, what is the highest potential you can achieve if you work together, bringing your knowledge and their knowledge and do it without ego, and paint a picture of a future you want to work on together? And when you start getting people to step into that flow of energy, amazing things happen. You know? And that, and that combination of my, you know, the mechanics of analysis and strategy and drive to deliver with Jim's genius-level intellect on the neuroscience of the flow of energy, created something quite extraordinary.

AK: Yeah. And I described you as working at the interface, but you were really seeing the whole thing as a system, an ecosystem that involves clients, involves partners. But you're also instrumental, and I don't mean to keep going on about this, but you're instrumental, I think, in really creating in the legal profession, the role of client relationship partner in any meaningful sense. It lacked definition until you started to work in this way, because there was a, you know, always running into the argument that 'I'm not remunerated for it', it's not something that's valued by the sort of, the structures of the firm and systems of the firms. And I think your radical proposition was, well, why don't we just define the role and then see if it becomes valued by the firm, by you, by the clients?

RO: Yeah.

AK: That was an interesting evolution, I think, of a role within law firms that had been in other professional services firms prior to that.

RO: But it still lacked, even, I mean, you know, we've worked with three of the Big Four. You know, we've worked with some of the biggest banks in the world, with Nike. You know, if you think about the componentry, the parts of the puzzle that we put together, you know, have a vision, a belief, set an energetic expectation of what we've got to bring to this as human beings, to create this vision, one. Two, understand each other at a much deeper level. Walk in each other's shoes, both internally as a team and with the client and the clients' customers, you know. Three, understand yourself, really understand yourself. You know, through things like the leadership circle or Zenger Folkman, 360, really understand yourself, where are your strengths, how can you lean into that? And then, be courageous. Invite the client in to that process. And when you - build - this is really important, build it as a habit. It's not an additional thing that you would do. And the leaders and the partners that really got this, and the younger lawyers as well, it became the way they would take instructions, the way they'd turn up to meetings, when they were negotiating M&A, it just became, oh, I can be more human in all the aspects of what I'm doing. Oh wow! And then, then this friction of, well I'm not rewarded for it, it's dropped away a little bit because it's just a better way of being, right? So it's a better way of turning up, you know, and healthier. I mean, I'm a massive advocate as you know, of physical health, and the mind and body are one. And I also became, a talisman is not the right word, but I also became sort of interesting to people because I was high-performing as an athlete in my late 40s and early 50s, and therefore people were interested in that whole flow of energy. Where does Richard get his energy from? Like, what is the, what's going on there? You know, and Jim said to me, like, physically, I saved his life, you know. He was, he had a bad diet, he had a poor exercise regime. You know, he was 20 years older than me. And he's a transformed person physically, athletically, rides his bike, goes to the gym, does yoga, you know. And I think I've, we've had that impact as well on people, that they really like. I'm getting them to ask themselves the questions, like, are you the best version of yourself as a human being? You know, mind, body, relationships, how you show up. And when you ask high-performing individuals that good question, and you can ask it in a way that's not frightening or confrontational, you can achieve amazing things. And that's the one thing I think I've learnt over the years, the quality of the questions people like you and I can ask, is where it's at. It's, what is the invitation we create for these super high-performing people, both in client side and in advisor side? Create the space, build the container for people to step into and express themselves as being more human… magic things happen.

AK: It's almost like the central question of this podcast is now redundant because you, I mean, clearly, you see that the role of human lawyers, or the humanity of lawyers, is central to the legal ecosystem. They're not - it's critical. Is that fair?

RO: Well, I would say… unnatural. Like it's unnatural. Like, why wouldn't you be the fullest expression of yourself as a human being? Whether you're a painter and decorator or electrician, an artist, a musician, a lawyer. Like what, why? So, I come at it slightly differently. We all know the training, the history, the, you know, it sort of pushes you away from that a little bit. I mean, interestingly, my son's 24. He's halfway through his training contract in London as a lawyer, right. So I'm also as a dad, I can see this up close and personal with him. But he's a chip off the old block, which is really interesting. So he's very, very interested. So he does one day a week in-house for a property management fund as part of his training contract. And he said to the partner supervising him, he said, 'oh, I'm going to go and see the, I've got a meeting with the finance director tomorrow. I'm going to ask her about her business and like, what's it like, and how does it feel, and how do you experience people like me'. And his boss said, what would you want to do that for? Right. And so, but my son is, he's just curious. Right. He's curious about human beings and the humanity that sits in these big organisations. Because he's a chip off the old block, you know, he's listened to me and he's been part of what I've been doing for the last ten years. But the interesting thing, I think, about lawyers, and I've always said this to lawyers, all the way through Ohten and even before Ohten, like, why did you seed so much ground on strategy and relationships, the boardroom, to the accountants? Right. Because the legal system is the system that, it allows people to create things. I can create intellectual property, I can create business structures, I can create - like it's a very, with a small c, part of the fabric, the creation that allows massive collaboration, allows businesses to operate. You know, accountants just count the beans of the results of it. You know, so I never really understood that. And so I think the combination of human legal is so powerful. It's so powerful. And I would say I've seen more impact had by the best law firms that operate in the way you and I see the potential, than any banker, accountant, management consultant. You know, I think it's a massive area that any young lawyer or any leader of a law firm should look to master this, this area of the flow of energy, mutuality, building a shared vision for what we as a bunch of lawyers can help our clients to create. Because we understand the system, we can help create the fabric and the system that allows a business or government or whatever to do its thing. Like, I think it's, you know, I'd love to sort of almost create like an academy or a sort of, or a school, you know, a human legal sort of place where people could come and talk about this stuff, because it's huge.

AK: I mean, that's sort of the impetus for this podcast. I did an analysis recently about a year and a half ago where I analysed all of the conferences available to lawyers around the world. I took their, I took the conference programs and I analysed it for keywords and created a Wordle. And the word 'human' didn't appear in, you know, 60,000 words. And 'performance' didn't appear. It's what wasn't there. And what I'm finding fascinating at the moment is gen AI and enabling technology. The conversation about it is, you know, about its benefits, features, and it seems as though the extent to which we're talking about humans in this conversation, human lawyers in this conversation, is the extent to which they can interface effectively with the technology. And I'm curious to ask the humanists I know, what do you see as the evolving role of lawyers if mastery doesn't exist within the retention and release of information? If our concept of mastery is really wrapped up in how much we know and how much we can articulate in response to a problem, then there's a risk, isn't there, that that's precisely what genAI is for? Now, I don't personally believe that our role in the legal ecosystem, our role in helping clients, is contained to that. And what you're describing is that it's intensely human, what we're doing.

RO: Well, yeah. And I, right on the cutting edge of this, it's creative, right? What do I mean by that? Like if you're alongside a client and the client's looking at a market, looking at - whatever, a project, an industry or whatever they're looking at, and as a lawyer, you want to be sat alongside them. And say, with what you know and your experience and your level of risk or courage or whatever, put that alongside mine and let's paint a picture of what's possible, what can be done to facilitate this, to make easy. And yeah, you can use your knowledge of the law and, you know, the, the AI stuff behind that. But I don't think it substitutes the feeling you have when you sit with another person and you look out to the future and you decide, what is it that we can achieve together here? That's a different, that's a different edge. And you know, maybe there's a conference that needs to be put on, Anthony, that we should think about putting on.

AK: I'm already thinking about it. I mean, that's where I think this leads, but I'm interested in your concept of a school, because you know, what you're talking about still, I think, is not dealt with in any detail in legal education generally. Like it's still… So where would you focus education of lawyers if we're trying to occupy this space, this technology-enabled redefinition of mastery and an emphasis of the humanity of the profession? Where would you start? What sort of things would you talk about?

RO: Well, I think there'd be probably three layers to it. The first would be, knowing yourself, knowledge of self, right. Things like leadership circles are brilliant for stuff like that, right. But you know, so knowledge of self, how do you show up, what happens when you're stressed, what happens when you're creative, how do you, how do you understand 'no', use that, would be the first thing. The second thing would then be to really understand the ecosystem thinking, and especially how human beings operate in ecosystems and this idea of energy and understanding energy and the flow of energy. And there'll be all sorts of things in there, you know, this stuff on language, this stuff on, in a dialogue, in a narrative, mindfulness. You know, there's a lot of stuff there about the flow of energy. And then the third would be, how do you as an individual have a strategy for that? What is your, you know, what is your way of piecing this together? It's a bit like, when, you might study law, but then there's negotiation as a skill. Like, it's a general skill. So for me, I'd be at those three levels. I mean, Dan Kayne and the O Shaped Lawyer movement in the UK, I've known Dan for years, you know, he's grappling with that and he's trying to sort of, you know, play into that with the Law Society and all that good stuff. Yeah. So, you know, it is beginning to happen, but I still see some of the biggest law firms in the world won't make - I'm talking to one at the moment, and they're just reluctant, they won't put money into it, they're not quite sure why it should be valuable to look at it. So this… Yeah, I mean, there's a long way to go with it. And I think this AI thing may just force the issue. It could be used for a real firework, you know, up the profession or whatever you want to call it, to say, hey, look, here's the territory that you can still own and master when finding knowledge at the click of a button suddenly becomes something easy.

AK: Now, you've taken your interest in all of this one step further and you're about to launch a book.

RO: Yes.

AK: Looking at wellness, essentially - what does it mean to be your best self? Do you want to just talk a little bit about the book and what its focus is?

RO: Yeah. Yeah, I mean it - someone said to me, you know, 'you're doing all this great work, Richard, for super successful wealthy lawyers, you know, who've got loads of money - and understand why you've done that because you've got a business and you want to make, you know, you want to provide for your family and all that stuff', but as I've moved into this sort of last transition, I think of my professional career, you know, I'm not going to retire. That's never going to happen. I'm just not that sort of person. You know, so for the next 20 years, what am I going to do? And, and this idea of trying to capture what I've seen work really successfully in my business, but also in my own personal life and you know, I've had quite a few ups and downs in the last few years, which I've really had to overcome. Putting this down in a way that anyone could pick up this book. It's called The Equation. And, you know, the strapline is, like improving your life one day at a time. And the equation, anyone who's done the sort of Ohten strategic leadership program would recognise aspects of the equation in that work. You know, what vision do you have for yourself? What is the best version of yourself that you want to see? Spend some time thinking about that. You know, be mindful. Live in the moment. Understand the flow of energy, the second part of the equation is that - how do you make sure you don't get dragged off worrying about the future or regretting the past if your life passes you by, the bit of life where you're actually living just passes you by? So how do you live in the moment? And then finally, how do you build good habits? How do you make, take choice out of … how do you build good habits? And that leads to you committing to this idea of mastery in your own life, you know, but not for your sake. For the sake of those that you're, you know, everyone lives in an ecosystem. And ultimately the goal of the book is to try and make humanity as an ecosystem a better place for us all to live. Sounds a bit grandiose, but, you know, if everyone did a little bit, it's a bit like fitness, becoming a world champion. I didn't suddenly become a world champion. What I did is, I did a little bit every day for five years. And we've all seen those clips on the internet, you know, 'if you spend 80 minutes a day doing something for a year, you'll be in the top 5% of people in the world at that thing'. You know, we've all seen those. And I'm a living, breathing example. I mean, there's my sort of world record, world championships for cycling memorabilia up there. I'm just a normal fellow who, by applying himself a little bit better every day, became world champion. And, you know, I think sometimes in change, in transition, we have these massive goals but forget if you just do a little bit towards them each day, in time you'll get there. And the idea of the equation is to, is to weave in all these ideas that we've talked about today, about, you know, we're part of an ecosystem and being mindful, being present to the moment and understanding your impact on other people and knowing yourself and your narrative. That's the one big thing, I think, if you said to me, what's been the one biggest thing we've helped people with, it's the story they tell themselves about why they're here. Why are you here? Are you here to make money? Or are you here to be a part - are you here to help your colleagues, the younger lawyers and the clients, get the best they can out of their careers and their projects and what they're trying to do? And at the same time, bring balance to that process so you can be there for the people outside of work that matter to you. And that, at the end of the day, is why we did what we did.

AK: Yeah. Well, you've certainly done more than a little bit, Richard. I've seen you have that impact on the humans you work with.

RO: Thank you.

AK: And you've certainly had that impact on me. And I really appreciate you joining me today on Legal Human. Thank you so much.

RO: Been a pleasure. Anytime, love to come back.

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

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