guys I love technology I will never stop talking about it I will never stop bringing speakers to talk about legal technology about legal Ops about AI in general and about any kind of technology that help us do our work this is the right moment for it because everything is evolving and everything is new and we are learning by doing and the more we talk about it the more we get to the bottom of things and know how to use it to develop the level of our Serv service and to develop our knowledge so for this today I'm inviting one of the experts someone who started legal Tech even before the word come out before it became something who started doing technology for the legal industry when it was a Marketplace and then she took it up until she is an expert right now with legal operations and legal technology and today we're going to ask her all the questions we're going to explore for her background and her experience and we'll take from her as much as we can to help us help our knowledge and guide us how to run our jobs and hand how to run our operations today my guest is Suzanna Kalendzhian good morning I'm back again with Monday legal my guest for today is Suzanna Kalendzhian a legal Tech and legal Ops expert and a very dear friend of mine and I ask her to be with us today to explore and talk again about legal Tech and legal Ops good morning and thank you very much for coming pleasure thank you for having me sozan can you please unlock for us this term because a lot of people come and talk and they explain what is legal Tech and what is legal Ops and in general we as practicing lawyers we um this these these terms are quite new to us and in general we're trying to understand and work a lot with technology but then when everybody's telling us that there is a dedicated legal technology that we should use and we should not go to the other Solutions and so on we get a little bit overwhelmed and not understand what's going on but before you go into that I would like to ask you first to tell us a little bit about your uh start and how did you come into this uh field well it's actually two connected topics because how I came to this field is what was missing in the educational field because when we are trained as a lawyers and I'm a corporate and Commercial lawyer by trade so what we are learned to do is as lawyers we are very backward looking sort of professionals because we are tend to take lawyers take legal takech law from the books implement it in business or in life in like our whatever you do litigation or corporate and not even look beyond that so laww is nothing but logic there is if this then that logic we were working like this for many years before the good lawyers were the people that knew the law from you know Court to coure like everything memorize it by heart memorize it exactly and that was the good lawyer the essence that's why they were very specialized in like family law or litigation now lawyers are more broad why because if you are a good lawyer you can find information easily yeah so then there was there was a technology that would help you find that information and implement it for your clients then the speed of the information became you know a bigger player and the good lawyer became the lawyer that would you know find the information faster um sort of have you back in a in a in a in a better workflow with the client and update you faster so the speed became like the core of what we do as a as a skill set for the lowers nothing like we are in 2025 nothing of the sort is still being trained at law schools till now if you can believe it or not so when I came to Dubai in 200 oh my God 11 like in in Ukraine we already had like emails um officially like you can send an email and that would be like a delivery of the documents here at that time you had to be a local lawyer in order to deliver the papers into the court and it was like all very very manual all the paperwork all the contracts all laws and regulations were only published and then like official Gazette and stuff you know it yeah um so I thought there should be a better way of doing these things so I started I I'm very grateful to my first law firm that took me because they were very open to the idea of like making things better we had the whole room full of files and so we started digitizing those files and putting them into the CRM system so that was my first ever if you talk about legal Tech that was my first ever legal Tech experience digitizing not digitalizing but digitizing the actual papers into the digital format then in the ZM system we started adding like clients information matter management and like more and more because it was so Innovative and new to the market um you know I've been referred to one low firm after another low firm after another L firm at some point I automated like over 200 fir firms including yours actually at some point I've helped you as well and in 2015 uh me and my co-founder we started a business which was again from my perspective very e-commerce business but we first time heard the term legal Tech business and we were actually against it because we were not a law firm and we were not providing any legal advice we were just this platform that will allow lawyers to find clients and the other way around open for everyone um initially free of cost right now still you can get free advice on the platform then then we added like a paid services and lawyers um you know to be on the platform they pay subscription fee we at that time were introduced to this as a legal Tech and the impact of the technology while I was doing all of this automations I was called it lawyer which is not the right term because it lawyer is the one that works on you know it issues and and kind of you know protects the it then it was law Tech then it was something else so the firm sort of moved from like she's doing something like an IT systems for lawyers yeah into like legal technology and operations meaning I'm the person that will come map out your processes within your organization what it means is like every single step you do within your Law Firm let's take endtoend Contracting for example you receive a request from the business if you are in house to drop to draft the surgeon contract then you go and you look for a template or you draft it from the beginning you look in the president you all of this is a process that I map out and I try to understand how you do it the more manual work is in there the more repetitive task are there the happier I am because the more work is there for me and then in a short sort of term legal Ops is everything to do with the way lawyers do business perform the service to clients at at today's day yeah I remember very well the very first first days of legal advice Middle East when you when you were launching the the platform the word legal Tech or legal Ops were not there and all what we uh relied on at that time was a website for lead generation uh a website for free legal advice a platform for uh matching clients with with lawyers and there were some profiles and so on what sort of so exactly listings articles exactly there was this is how we were looking for lawyers or the chat you remember um forums when I came to Dubai it was a big thing yes like you would have kittens and recommendation for restaurants and then lawyers and the real estate all all at once like no professional platform exactly and and what was significant at that time for me was it was the first time ever I was um answering legal questions um to strangers to people that I don't know I usually get an email from one guy based on referral and and I know who who is coming from and I ask I answer the question and just hope that he gets back to me because I I H I I can close a deal uh when you introduced your platform there was like 100 questions so 100 leads at that time so it was a lot of fun I was really doing it out of enjoyment I was enjoying answering questions here and there and I was able to get clients from there and at that time it was as you said it's e e-commerce was like a Marketplace for lawyers did you face a lot of challenges because for me for example I was so enjoying I was so happy to be on the platform all day long answering questions did you meet a lot of challenges to convince lawyers to come into it that's why we are very good friends for a very long time because what I remember the most out of my entrepreneurial experience is the first two months when I booked 5050 meetings with lawyers with law firms around the by and I was driving obviously it wasn't it was before covid so you had to meet in person you had to drink coffees in every place you need to like find a parking all of that it was a hustle in and of itself but the meetings oh my god um I remember people was off were offering me jobs they were saying like oh Habibi you are so nice this is not going to work come work for us like why do you need this this is not come on and then um some was saying like oh um it's not something that you know I I don't think our clients are there did you get one of those lectures is like let me introduce you to the world of Law and how it works oh my God being young and being a woman in the Middle East I've had all kinds of things all kinds of things being like men explained to me over and over again and I was there and I was I the the good thing about all of this experience is that my co-founder was the most supportive person out of everyone he's like and I was sitting in the car after almost every meeting during the day and was just crying thinking like what am I doing like people don't even understand the concept of what we are doing uh and then there was a pivotal moment when we had enough lawyers on the platform to make a difference and then whatever you Google you'll find in both English and Arabic you'll find our page in the first drop like before any ads before anything and then when this started like popping up in a lot of low firms like as a as a search because you look for laws and regulations so we p a lot of laws and regulations that we've translated that we structured easy to search like navigate um we then had references from Global sort of libraries of laws and regulations for the Middle East pointing at us so our domain became bigger and bigger then we had the support from yeah the pivotal moment in general um in 2016 the he Institute of innovation law came to us and they essentially explain to us what our business means to the region that we are making it safe that people seeing that there is like an open platform for laws and regulations it makes them sort of not be so you know judgmental because the region was like at that time you not compare it to now when people are no very nicely judged yeah exactly so at that time they've calculated the impact of how many people lives we can like help um and access to Justice term was also introduced to us they help us understand the depthness of what we were doing it helped a lot because we then should have looked at our business in a in a different perspective because it was a business before and then it got meaning I know that usually people have a meaning first and then they move but I really saw the pain of lawyers not being able to find good leads and work with proper clients and again people are coming and going in Dubai so you you really can't build this pipeline of clients um as you would do anywhere else so my my mind was more commercial and the he Institute of innovation law introduce us to Legal Affairs Department introduce us to Ministry of justice and we've done many projects with M Ministry of justice so even now we have an official duplication of the website which is connected um to databases of ID and um Ministry of Justice where all the local lawyers there is a separate website for all the local lawyers that work with under the ministry of Justice we've done multiple projects with them where we sort of try to have the market visibility on what kind of questions are being asked what kind of services been provided and like what is needed because they had a strategy of making law more accessible and we sort of played a pivotal role for them as well in being in this region then I started adding the regions and now we are in 18 countries and have traveled and I've sort of meet the people and then it became easier but at the beginning no one actually believed in what we were doing it was so new and so out of time that I think at some point I was even thinking like we launched too early we had no support the market was not ready everyone was investing at that time in e-commerce but buy sell Buy sell yeah Goods 90% of those companies are dead by now but at that time I felt like I'm missing out I'm doing something that is not oh and investors that's is a whole separate topic but they were like advising us to go into document um management system into like it systems for lawyers into like more CRM or creating things more customer service rather than you know facing clients um which would have been a better idea at that time probably because there was nothing Regional based and um business-wise it it probably made sense but then we already had that mission we already had the he saying us that it's the most important thing ever access to Justice Do It um so yeah it's just a different time different values and hearing you speaking about this I realized that it took you a lot of time to um from where you started until now or from where you started in in many uh um stages how did the technology itself evolved because technology was much faster than of course technology is always much faster but I mean it was too fast to follow and you develop this platform from being just a question and answer and access to Justice or providing uh access to PDF documents and uh articles and so on into something else how did the technology evolve with you so at the beginning when we were starting we took an idea from the us-based company called avvo and there was another one Legal Zoom um they were doing pretty similar um but at the same time they had um Legacy systems in all the lawyers that they worked with I worked with lawyers that had nothing zero like they still would have I don't know like an email official email like if it's going to be like elar AE great usually just Google just Yandex just something yeah um so I had to help those law firms also navigate the lead after the lead generation the CRM right so I started working with them on implementing U MET Management and CRM systems for them and at that time there was like simple systems that would help with this process then they started being more advanced then they became powered with automation so let's say if there is a lead that you received that you responded and the person bought the service we can plug that in through API to your CRM system and it will be converted sort of documented with Finance information with like everything so it just we and we started playing because we had so many you know questions asked in natural language and lawyers responding in a proper language not legal language it was also a pivotal moment for people to realize that lawyers can speak not legal e but the proper language simple plain language and they would understand them and it would build trust as well that's the whole separate also conversation about lawyers being too lawyer um and in this region it just the language is different so lawyers can actually speak plain language and we started working on like some first initial machine learning algorithms on our platform playing with the data and trying to understand how to help lawyers navigate all those hundreds of questions so you'll have the most relevant questions on top was a very simple sort of play with AI at that net AI it was machine learning algorithms very simple um open source and we were trying to play with this information to just aggregate it faster to help with translation to help lawyers answer then we've added open AI um and open AI right now analyzes the whole system so that it can help you as a lawyer get the most relevant questions to cut the time of answer and help the client to make the right decision my Evolution because I'm very geeky you know me I love everything new all the time it's like my core values is change transformation Innovation everything to do with strategy building like thinking forward that's me so I would test everything I have like access to um I would travel to all the conferences so there was no conversation here now you see TR is doing like legal Ops in Tech you see um Lexus Nexus you see um PWC you see all of this bigger companies would bring talents into the buy for like conferences and you will hear people speak about like legal Ops legal technology how they operate how they automate stuff at that time here litigation conferences um something about migration law like very specific very boring very super lawyer conferences so I would travel to Sydney I would travel to London I would travel to New York to just listen to those people like Legal Zoom like Avo like all of these guys that I was looking at and thinking like oh my God I wish I had that you know infrastructure around me because we were building it for all the other tech companies legal tech companies to come in here and then you know sort of pick up because the same as um for example if you remember there was the company before Amazon that Amazon acquired here was Suk Suk yes so what they've done is not that they've built the market or you know that's why Amazon bought them is because they built payment system that was not here because they already convinced and find buyers and sellers um to like work on the system they they've prepared the whole region they had infrastructure in place so basically they build the roads for bigger trucks to come and then just use them this is pretty similar to what we have done in terms of like legal Tech because at that time when we started no one actually knew what that is no one believed in legal Tech everyone thought that lawyers you know everyone is talking about lawyers being overwhelmed and taken over by robots no one believed ever until now when it's there is an AI conversations lawyers is still skeptical they're like I have I have a vision I'm so knowledgeable I'm so good that it's never going to happen so at that time it was even more because they had this confidence in them I was not even visible to anybody that actually machine learning will develop so much into an AI tool can talk to you yeah this is what we had in our mind and this is what the people here especially in this region like everything being super cool super new um and advanced and at the same time the legal system was still lagging behind so much even comparing to like Global um which now is a bigger Advantage we can talk about this later but in general I think this region has the biggest advantage over like everyone in the world for very small reason because we don't have Legacy systems to deal with yeah this is one of the things as well that I started to notice is that there's a jump from where we were 10 years ago till now that we only talk about legal Tech and we only talk about legal Ops and everybody is is investing in knowledge system everybody is investing in technology and uh for this I would like to understand what do you see that the region needs or let's say the smaller law firms the regular low firms who are like 10 to 100 they need now to make the change because technology is overwhelming and it's kind of expensive it's getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper that's a good news so now the systems that are super AI super Advanced that can do everything for you for you end to end for all the things Contracting and work like in seconds cost you $200 a month it was nothing like that even a year ago yeah the AI systems what they're why they are completely transformational and Innovative in a way that is like an iPhone introduction is because initially it was very expensive but it can do so much and it can analyze so much um and it reach to the point where like we can deal with the data even given it a very simple prom right now or like very crappy prom as well it can still understand what you mean because it has enough you know level of data and understanding it's also because of this advancement doesn't require that much energy so it's getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and now it's the it's it's basically Market game and Market play for everything AI deep seek completely destroyed the market because they buil the systems that were took open AI six years and billions of dollars for like six million in six months $6 million like you look at it and you think it's a big amount but for the systems like that it's just unbelievable yeah so something like that is going to pop up every single day so my advice to all of my smaller clients is usually picking up the tech that is easy to use and it's not like big deployment implementation costs and like migration of data because everything to do like before the CLM systems that was mainly when used speak to people um legal Tech professionals included Unfortunately they only speak about clms because this is the biggest chunk there is a lot of Professional Services involved it's a very expensive tool in general like usually they are over half a million dollars and then the implementation cost over you know $700,000 there's a very complex systems and require a lot of input but also they require data migration so so all of your contracts that are not everywhere in your SharePoint one drive your I don't know spouse computer somewhere you need to gather that in understand what is what map them map them and then now again we have we have a multiple middleware companies that help with like understanding and labeling of the data but it's still very expensive because you need to like only map out it's it's just not even like there is no interface for this you can't actually see the system that you are paying for but it's a very expensive problem to have so if you're a smaller firm what I would do is just to have one tool test it out play with it work with it and then when the new tool is there you can just easily migrate and you look at your processes you identify the why you identify the what because usually people say just because I'm afraid like everyone else is using it I need to get this tool and then it's the completely and I'll give you an example so I worked with two companies um and they knew each other like General consuls would know each other um and they would speak and one Law Firm took this um you know tool and they came to another one and said like oh I took this Tool It's amazing And they also but this come guys they're client of mine so they come to me and say like oh we have this tool you need to implement it for us we've heard amazing things about it but I know that their use case their use cases are different so this Law Firm works with bulk chunks of documents so they need to drop them in analyze map out and understand when what happened and what terms were there what change like compliance essentially like with for the laws and regulations in terms here lawyers negotiate heavily so what they need is the red Lin in and negotiation tool the tools that they've selected is good for their use case but the red line in the negotiation add in for example for w is not even there or it's there but it's less features than you know the tool out of the box that you can just pick up and and cheap probably so then this is my advice probably to like look for a simpler system and look for like your particular use cases ideally if you have an understanding if you have access to Consultants that can help you like map out your process understand your why understand because this is the adoption then like you can have beautiful systems that no one will use so if you start with why if you invite all of the stakeholders to participate in this decision if you understand what people are facing and what problems you are solving the whole process of implementation and understanding what you need jointly especially when you're a smaller company is much useful much more for for your money and for your time is invested you'll get the longlasting results for sure this is very cool and I think it's it's really doable but one of the biggest challenges that I always see is is that how to to use it and I might be investing not so many or a lot but um even though if the training is not so easy or if everybody in the firm is not making use of it is like having an expensive piece of tool that no one is using and no one is able to use or know how to use or at least use 10% of the featur you'll have and never wear exactly how do you solve that systems are solving this right now so the simpler the systems are becoming simpler they require less training in general I have to say that my opinion is that I don't believe in change management I don't believe in training if people want to find out how it works they can find out how it works if there is no why they probably won't because it's just not their you know they're like it's just too complicated or I'm I've been using my Excel for many years it work just fine if you need it you you use it the systems got it and so now what they're doing is they're simplifying steps and stages so now for example a couple of tools that I recommend to smaller firms they are so sensor inuitive as like iPhone you you you you sort of see where they're coming from and instead of writing like this prompt there is a button for this like can you review this contract and tell me me am I protected and I'm representing this party that's it and it's just going to have you like review the document and help you navigate the document straight away you don't have to train it you don't have to create a CLA Library you don't have to it has so many presidents globally and locally that you can also feed your own but if you don't have those it's okay it can help you so the the selection of the simpler systems easier to use is probably the higher chances you'll get people on board because people are busy and they're lazy and they don't want to spend training hours on training and does yeah but but this means that there's no training needed or there is a minimum training needed but more so like you do stuff on it and you sort of play with it yeah what what what I noticed most is that is not just the training that is the problem it's the resistance to change is is the bigger problem and especially when you have a 10 15 years old sorry 10 15 years experien lawyer who is much more senior than than the rest and the smaller the firm the resistance is because we know each other yeah so much exactly so uh I don't know how to fix that I mean I'm telling you this is a problem because I see it it is a com yeah it is a very common problem trust me is the same in smaller organization as it is in bigger in bigger you also have like games where I don't like the system or I don't like the person that introduce the system as well and that is even hard this this is even harder to gain because it's not that obvious and subjective you can just like I don't like you and that's why I'm not going to like do whatever you know support you in whatever you're doing so there is that but um you know what I heard the other day and I'm reading quite a lot of books on this as well just because I'm trying to understand how so the first book that I probably recommend is start with why it's it's an amazing book about the reasoning behind bigger companies and their decisions into transformation but also there is a book called impact players so this this book says about people that you know when you hire a new professional to a firm or you have someone in your firm and especially if you're building it and smaller you need to find people with the willingness to change like with the mindset because everything else like skills like you can you can train that but you cannot train the willingness to change and the Curiosity Factor if the person is not curious about how AI works or how systems works or what is happening in the market or they're not curious to know how younger generation think you cannot do anything unfortunately this is my this is my take you just have to deal with those people and and and give them pen and paper and help them then with your systems outside where do you see this the future of this uh legal technology or legal Ops where it will take us or where it will take the firms in the coming few years it's very hard to predict with the eye right now just because I done a training and there was a question for example like last week and there was a question whether you know we can do multiple reasoning at the same time um in the llm model and it wasn't possible and then last week it was released and then now you have canvas now you have so the the level of like add-on experiences or like level of advancement of technology is so fastpaced that if you know that how the future looks you're probably just bragging about it or you can just drink a coffee and just you know like do the magic but I think General view is that lawyers are going to be supercharged by so many TCH that they're that there will be a shift in the um um charging billing situation somehow that it just coming to a point where it's inevitable um but everything else will stay the same people still need other people because lawyers are pretty much your you know psychologist your shrinks you come and you don't only want to give them the problem but you want them to support you you want them to like look at you and say like everything's going to be okay I'll sort it for you this is what we are paying for companies like larger companies this is what they're paying for internally when it's like an in-house team what business is paying for is the lawyers to become their Partners is to lawyers to be enablers like make it work yeah and lawyers there not to say like oh you made a deal but the terms are not right and you know like the there there is a term fee burners and fee earners like fee burners is what the usual term for lawyers within organization is like they're just you know like this blockers so we need to change that we need to become a part of the business we need to automate as many processes as possible so that business is Unleashed but legal has an eye and the review on everything so I think the system will become more or traded more linked to each other um again Middle East is in the very best position because we don't have Legacy systems that we have to deal with like Oracles ibms of this world only a few companies here would have it and then we are dealing with flexible systems with a lot of API connections we can make them work together as a as a workflow like you can connect one system to another and then you just click one button and they just processed and everyone's get notified and I love building those systems because you look at how you know this just flow know and you're like Yay this is this is the future yes yes I want to ask you about um a very um important uh point because you have worked in the e-commerce when you started the the the platform uh legal advis mle East in the beginning and you worked a lot with the lawyers on the pricing of the services and the pricing uh that for the rfqs that uh you introduce later on and you've seen as well the big firms who are through your clients with il legal Tech and legal Ops and how it affects their billing as you mentioned a few uh seconds ago what is the change in the Dynamics of how the lawyers make money based on the changes that's happening in technology because um let's say corporations understand that we are using now much more technology than we used to use we used to they re this exactly so they understand that it is easier and it's faster and it's not really taking us 10 hours to come up with this memo it probably taking us two hours and we're charging for 10 that's one part are you or let's say do you imagine that the fees will have to change your fee structures will have to change from the hourly rate into more fixed rates or the Dynamics will change I really don't know but I think the fixed rate is also not a solution for that yeah um there is a saying that in order for me to drop the contract for you in 15 minutes I've studied 10 years and that's why I charge for 10 hours and it's very true yes so with AI I'm a lawyer to review of whether this is actually correct or not correct and there is a whole discussion on how this can work but I think neither this the the the way it works right now like hourly billing or like a fixed billing would actually solve this problem there should be some sort of combination of the cost of the technology the save time and then the perceived value and then you know the there's so many aspects to it because again clients now I saw multiple rfps when they require they asking you for what kind of tools you're using and based on what tools you're using they can actually allow you to um you know work with their data yeah so if there is a requirement like that and we need to bear the cost as a law firm and we need to work on you know all those you know Technologies we need to train we need to the overall there is a cost involved from La firm side and they need to distribute it the cost later on on like clients so it's a in my mind there should be some hybrid you know complex system of calculations of this because having a fixed fee on something you know it's it's it's it's also outdated or or having like flexible retainer on like the number of hours it's also outdated like both of these systems are not proper right now because again we use some of the things that are very heavy rely on technology certain things we are still very heavily uh you know rely on lawyers and their knowledge and in order to incentify those lawyers to actually do their job we need to pay them how the whole separate question so it's going to change it must be a change happening Fe for sure so I'm I'm running my Law Firm for more than a decade now okay and I'm very tech savvy and I like the technology and you know that and I still don't see what exactly is the strategy or building a strategy with the technology and systems will help I know the tools that help me I know the tools that my team are trained enough and they know it I know I can imagine the tools that I would like to upgrade to but I don't understand what is strategy and why do I need it yeah so my work sort of from this is the evolution of my profession as a legal technologist as well um initially like we just knew that we need for the client like a CLM system right we we just wanted a system they're like come implement or maybe if they're a little bit more advanced they would have a benchmarking exercise so we will look for multiple tools we will compare them with each other score and then Implement usually it's just the hard choice of you know the person in charge um so there is no like proper thinking behind it then because we already have so many system in our architecture so for example you're using CLM Finance is using another system um then you're adding on the ecovery tool the laws and regulations um compliance tool and then um you know Horizon scanning tool they are everywhere and we are not sure how people are using it or how like what kind what from all of the processes what things are covered and what things are not so then my task became to build the overall strategy of where the company is moving and how like what tool the company might need in the next decade or not even DEC decade in in the next let's say year or two and then we break it down into the road map of deliverables so what the strategy will look like is essentially this this is your state as is this is how it can look like and this is how to get there with whatever you have in hand so some systems when they are outdated there is a whole process of changing the system and migrating it to a new one and then if we are putting the new system in we want it from the get-go we want it to be connected and Interlink to existing systems other other things like board Management systems and stuff so we then check straight away if you build a in the strategy you have like a 360 view of everything that company does what legal department does or Law Firm does in order to then understand how to connect this into the proper architecture of the firm you know actions so in short strategy is when you know what you're doing how you're doing it and where you want to go from where you are right now so I will list all of your problem areas I will list all of the opportunities for growth I will also explain to how system work I will give you the data on all the numbers that you're missing so for example if I ask um there is a property platform here in the midle East that I worked with and when I asked their general manager General conso how many times he copies and paste the answers from the Brokers to his email he said I don't know maybe like 20 day yeah so what I discovered is was more than 100 is just because it's just happens so rapidly in his mind that he just like does it almost automatically and we can automate that so you look for for like gaps or you look for ways to automate things or you look for ways to connect things so this is what um the strategy look like for a la firm it's it's less so or it depends sometimes it's it's it's more about your your law firm and how you operate and sometimes it's how you operate and deal with your clients so sometimes clients has a system that he wants you to to work with or link with and you don't want to have two CRM systems in your in your space you want to have if it's a m litigation for example then you need a case man matter management system that you own for other matters as well but they also might have one because they have internal like inhouse team that works on those as well so in order for those two to connect we also need need to understand how what what playing field What fields they need and so on so it's when you look deeper into processes this is a strategy and what could be the strategy for a new startup Law Firm so for example you talked a lot about migration and changes from old systems to new ones now I'm starting a new law firm I just resigned from my company yeah I got with me two of my colleagues and two admin we five people and we're going to take it from there and start what could be the starter kit when it comes to Legal technology I would sit with you on the round table and discuss the values and where you what you want to be for your clients if from the get-go your idea is that we are going to be Tech first um if your idea is that we want to serve commercial clients if your idea is that we want to use AI is just the set of things that are going to become your core and then from this core you make a decision on what tools you you need in order to serve this particular client so you if you are starting from scratch it's amazing because you can just ask questions on who you want to be in like a year or two year five years and then you sit and you build the strategy from the start so we want this is our North Star in five years we're going to have this turnover we are going to have this clients and maybe even names of the clients and then you get to know what those clients like for example if your target is like Amazon of this world what are their RFP look like let's ask what their requirements are and build to it so that we when we are there we are ready yeah so this is what you do you start from understanding who your target clients are who you are and who you want to how you want to operate as well you've mentioned a couple of times the Middle East is in the right position because we don't have the Legacy to change where do you see the Middle East going especially with the um flooding of population and the growing population right now yeah it's interesting because the influx of people and new talent in this region is playing a pivotal role as well like every single person with their experience and knowledge of you know previous government setups and everything they come here with their knowledge and understanding how things should work and because uee is being so different in their approach in general they are AI first they are everything the newest the the biggest the best the best um it's sort of the combination of these two creates a good ecosystem the good environment for growth because there is no there are resources for that I I can see that a lot of people invest a lot of money and time into the systems into AI into the opportunities that are out there and there are talents to actually execute it and do it best because before you had the resources but had no talent to do it so now all two coming together in a beautiful you know um sort of chemical reaction is happening out of this and then the other thing the fact that uee from the GG go decided that they're going to Bei first um and they should have jumped on a plane before it was even like recognized by so many players on the market we now are more advanced in many system and I think the good example maybe for this would be like China they went from you know paper money into the phone payments and they skipped the cards completely because it was so long into the game that the cards were like globally everywhere and the cash was not you know and for for China for a very long time it was only cash and then they shifted straight away into like phone payments uee pretty much did the same we went from no systems whatsoever to the most advanced systems in the world because we had the resources no Legacy system the talent is here the opportunities are here and also division is here like I worked with national oil companies in here and like property um uh portals and you know the airline companies all of them have leaders who truly believe that systems can work differently and they're what ready to invest in it train themselves be curious about it and just go for it unlike everywhere else where we have people who would think about it and who will be afraid of there are still certain regulations on the data they're very strict but other than that people can do can I say epic you can they can do epic projects in here and um like never and nowhere before if anybody would like to um take up a career in the legal Tech or what we call Legal Ops what are the steps and where where would they start I've seen so many different people coming to this from different angles um if you are a student probably this is where you will start to learn different Technologies and be curious in Tech and then you start trying and there are so many platforms that will give you access free of charges because you're a student use that um see whether this is interesting if if even if you are not going to become legal technologist you probably are going to be more advanced than any of your peers good bonus if you are a lawyer who is aspired by the technology and wants to use it then there are so many trainings as well and you know free of cost YouTube everywhere you just you you just ask um and play with it but um in general if you want to take this as a career as a career choice then you start where you are look at the things around you that doesn't work and try and make it work with the help of Technology with the help of change of processes whatever you want to whatever you see as a solution just try and implement it you'll see how hard it is to convince people how hard it is to get the right data the right placeholders you will see all of the needies and greedies of this process and you will understand whether this is yours if it's yours how it was for me for example when I first started working with my Law Firm at that time I realized that my life will never go back to like proper lawyering I just knew that my future is in this like I need to work I I love messy problems I love messy systems I love when there is no system whatsoever and this is my core value I come and I see opportunities everywhere if you are that this is definitely a way for you I'll take you the other way around you mentioned at the beginning of uh the talk that no universities are teaching legal technology and I know for a fact that you did a few courses as well in the in this field for postgraduates though exactly what do you say to the to the all the universities of law what's your advice to them just because of the Practical side and what you see of the market what is needed for lawyers to be trained for that's number one and number to uh until this happen where can we get the proper courses that is not just blah blah blah information because there's so many just the proper courses and a proper education material that we take for legal Ops and legal Tech yeah well I um I have a tendency to take so my for my personal professional development I take a course every year on something um am I has a number of courses online that you can take um uh Boston University also released a number of it specific legal oriented courses so you look for ways to get the new certification all the time at least for me this is my ongoing never stopping kind of yes it's it's it's it's what I do on on a daily um I read um I build myself an automation where I scan out the news and then it's filters down through with AI and just gives me the Snippets of what is interesting what can concern me so this is my newsletter I receive it every week and I go and if there's something interesting more particular about this something that I do I just go deeper and I do the research on the deeper things so I build it on make.com or there are plenty of tools bard.com there are plenty of automation tools you can do it it's free of cost um you just plug in all of the sources and you look for information that is relevant to you I think if you are curious enough you'll find education globally I'm not so sure about the Middle East as like for example I took a course the year before last in bueras law school amazing course and legal Ops in um nii and it gave me a lot of it's not only the fact that you you were given the knowledge and you can take it but also the the the network and the mindset of people that are there like I was I usually I'm usually the youngest person in the room I get used to it there I was one of the oldest oh wow okay yeah I was one of the oldest and it was amazing because there's certain things that I thought I knew were sort of challenged by the youngsters who came from all over the globe and they were putting their challenges in so putting yourself in a situation I I wish I'm I'm still looking forward to working with the universes here more because I was invited to sort of um consult on the bachelor's degree and the master's degree in um a couple of universities here in Dubai and it never actually got into the point when they announced the legal Tech as a as a part of the main curriculum usually it's just a course on the side usually just for postgrads as a part of the certification it's something different but not really what people need thank you very much likewise right interesting talk likewise we learned a lot yeah I'm happy to be here with you anytime I don't think we ever spoke about this no so deeply with you the first time yeah that's good we learned a lot I hope everybody enjoyed and um I thank you very much for coming and for dedicating the time pleasure thank you and this is you do from Monday legal see you next week