A Brief Conversation: With Sam Burrett

With Sam Burrett

Associate Commercial Director at Plexus, Distinguished Fellow at the College of Law Centre for Legal Innovation, Podcast Host and Author at the Leading Lawyer Project.

Olivia Mueller

Sam Burrett isn’t your typical lawyer. Once a gym owner and today a lawyer by training, Sam calls himself ‘a relationship builder and entrepreneur at heart’. Working at the intersection of law, technology and business, Sam is passionate about progressing the legal industry by advocating for progressive legal business models and integrated legal technology. Sam’s work at Plexus is centered around building Australia’s leading dynamic legal resourcing firm, and he also previously worked at LegalVision, a commercial law firm disrupting the market with its commitment to innovation.

I caught up with Sam to discuss his passion for doing law differently, what changes the legal profession is facing in light of technological advancements, and how best Macquarie law students can equip themselves with the skills required to thrive in a changing legal landscape. The Brief would like to thank Sam for his time, and his invaluable insight into NewLaw and the intersections between law and technology.

Could you share with us a bit about your journey from Law School to where you are today? Why are you so passionate about doing law differently?

I was really fortunate to get a job pretty much as soon as I finished Law School. I actually had very little experience while I was at Law School because I owned and was running a gym, and so while I was going through Law School, I had really good experience in the trials and tribulations of small business ownership. I originally started the gym because I thought it’d be a great way to pay my way through uni and earn a bit more than the $25 per hour that I was getting paid as a personal trainer. It turns out that owning a business is a bit more complicated and time consuming than that, and so I learnt a lot about how businesses are run, which really shaped my interest in law. I was never really particularly interested in large corporate law and I didn’t ever have dreams of working in a top tier firm. Instead, I was actually really keen to work with startups and small businesses to help them overcome some of the challenges that I had faced. I also knew that I didn’t want to practice traditional law because I have always had an interest in technology and the way that the world is changing. So, as a result, I was sort of drawn to what was then the early new law movement. And there weren’t a lot of law firms around like that at that time.

I was really lucky that I personal trained somebody who was a senior executive at one of the big banks, and he introduced me to one of the co-founders of LegalVision. I wasn’t super sold until I met Ursula Hogben, who is an absolute force to be reckoned with in the law and a really impressive human. She told me all about LegalVision, their mission and why they were trying to change the legal industry, and absolutely sold me on the dream. I was really fortunate from there to get through to their application process and join their graduate program. That was my first foray into the law, and I’ll dive into that a little bit more in the later questions. But that is how I got from Law School into the law, and it kind of started my passion for doing law differently - being surrounded by people who were passionate about that, but also recognising through my experience at the gym that the client experience of the

legal industry is very different to the lawyer’s experience of the legal industry; that’s always kept front of mind for me and has guided the way I approach the law and the changes in the industry.

The term ‘NewLaw’ has become a bit of a buzzword. For those who aren’t so sure what this term really means, how would you characterise

NewLaw?

This is a tricky one because no one owns the term NewLaw, although I believe it was coined by Erin Chin who is a Principal at a firm called Alpha Creates which is a consulting firm that helps law firms and legal departments become more efficient. I would also say that George Beaton who is one of the industry’s key thought leaders and one of the most important people thinking about how to practice law differently, had a really big hand in coining the term with his book ‘NewLaw, New Rules’. They are big heavyweight thought leaders who have put a lot of thought into what this term means, but to me there are probably two ways I think about NewLaw. Firstly, there is a reactionary element of NewLaw. It sits in reaction to big law or traditional law, so that includes reaction to the partnership model, reaction to the way legal services are delivered and a reaction to the way that firms are run, including the way employees engage with those kinds of reactive elements and NewLaw.

There’s also a proactive element to NewLaw as well which is, NewLaw firms are future focused firms, they are thinking about what technology is coming down the pipe, and how that might be relevant, what innovations we can take from other industries or other professions, whether that’s marketing and business development or technology and consulting, and how can we bring them into the legal industry. There are all sorts of things involved with the proactive element, but I’d say that the reactive and proactive elements are an important part of understanding what NewLaw is. Increasingly, we’re also seeing NewLaw become a part of what traditional law firms do as well. For example, we’ve seen the rise of PwC’s NewLaw department. So, they have a legal services arm where they deliver traditional hourly billed legal services, and they have a NewLaw arm where they do legal operations consulting. Similarly, Herbert Smith Freehills, the largest law firm in the world, they have an alternative legal services arm, and so [NewLaw] is hard to categorise because it’s now being adopted by the traditional players but there’s definitely that reactive and proactive element to it.

LegalVision refers to itself as a market disruptor in the commercial legal services industry. Could you tell us about the way that LegalVision is reimagining traditional legal practice?

There are so many ways that LegalVision is doing law differently, but I’ll touch on a few of the key ones that underpin all the other different features. The first is that LegalVision runs a different legal business model to a traditional law firm. Traditional law firms are set up in a partnership structure which has its own problems and benefits. LegalVision is an incorporated legal practice, which is really significant because it’s one of the first law firms in Australia and one of the leaders in the world in raising capital. It’s historically been very hard and prohibited by regulations for law firms to get outside investment outside debt from a bank, but LegalVision has been able to do that not just because they are an incorporated legal practice, but also because they have technology, new ways of working and new ways of organising legal businesses that make their business investment-worthy.

An investment model totally changes the way that you operate a law firm; it’s not operated in the traditional partnership where there’s a lot of traineeship involved

which means there’s a drive for efficiency because the people who run Legal Vision are beholden to investors. They have a motivation to do things differently for the benefit of clients ultimately, that is simply not present in the partnership model. I think all the great things they do flow on from there: they cut out their overheads and allow most of their lawyers to work remotely online, although they do have an office; they invest very heavily ahead of the curve in great talent and technology which means they are able to continue innovating. They also publish free content online which has made them the most visited

website in Australia for legal questions; they have the biggest piece of online real estate and all of that is made possible because they have an entirely different way of thinking about how you should run a law firm.

I understand that in your role at Plexus you have worked with some of Australia’s top General

Counsel and in-house legal teams. How do you leverage technology to help these teams improve their in-house legal functions?

I’m really lucky to work with Plexus. Not only do we have this amazing book of clients; forward thinking general counsels of top legal teams from Coca Cola, L’oreal, Australia Post, University of Melbourne - just amazing clients who are thinking about how to run their legal departments differently, but we also have a really great market-facing arm of our business where we conduct about 100 meetings across our business with legal teams and general counsel every month. So, I don’t think anyone speaks to the legal teams and general counsels more than we do. That means we have a really interesting take on the challenges that general counsels are facing right now.

How we use technology to help teams improve their legal functions, well there’s a lot to that: there’s three categories of technology that Plexus primarily operates in. The first is automation, the second is matter management and then lastly contract management. And so we leverage those different elements of our platform, which is called Plexus Gateway, and the platform is modular which means you can turn each of those three elements on or off at will as is relevant to you, to help legal teams do all sorts of things. But the key challenges that they’re trying to solve with technology with those three elements are reducing time spent on low-value, low-risk work and eliminating manual processes. And also scaling risk management.

Legal teams use technology to scale risk management, so to meet the demands of more clients in the business without hiring more lawyers. They use legal technology to reduce the manual processes in their function, so instead of having to download a document from your Gmail, open it in Word, then save it and upload it to another contract management system, they use technology to do that all automatically. And then they use technology to reduce the time they spend on boring routine tasks. No lawyer goes to law school to review 30 NDAs a month, right? They want to do super interesting work, they want to negotiate with counterparties and go to court. Instead, a lot of in house lawyers are stuck repeatedly drafting the same agreements over and over again. It’s a huge problem. And so the technology that Plexus has automates the creation of template documents. And once a document is templatized, you can have Joe Bloggs in your sales team creating your key commercial contract basically using automation. So it’s a good thing for legal functions to know how to do.

Law is commonly seen as quite a traditional profession, which is resistant to change and slow to adapt to developments in technology. What do you see as the future of firms which do not wish to innovate and ‘keep up with the times’?

The overarching point is that law students will need to be adaptable, because the legal industry in which they start their careers will be completely different to the industry where they become senior partners. And so, they will need to be more adaptable than any other generation in the past.”

I have a couple of thoughts on this. The first is that change isn’t uniform. There are parts of the legal industry that are much further ahead than other parts of the legal industry. We have new solo law firm practitioners going out on their own and building entire legal practices around technology. They’ve got CRM customer relationship management software, e-billing, client management, all on their computer. At the same time, we still have bush lawyers who operate one hundred percent on paper. So, the future isn’t evenly distributed. It’s already here, but it’s just not everywhere. So that will continue to be the case. We will see some law firms continue to push further and further ahead I think over the next two decades, and they will continue to eat up more and more of the market as they create a better competitive advantage.

Similarly, the effects will lag on the smaller end of the spectrum where there’s less money for smaller firms and solo practitioners to invest in technology, and they’ll be further behind. But if you expand your time horizon to 50 to 70 years, we’re talking about a completely radically different legal industry, where there is no question about whether or not your small law firm uses legal technology. And I think it’s important to keep that time horizon in perspective, because the law students going through law school now might well operate in an environment where everything is digital and the way that we interface with the law will be completely different as technology continues to not only computerise previously manual tasks, but increasingly automate tasks so that lawyers don’t actually have to do that work.

You would no doubt have a strong understanding of the skills and mindset required of young lawyers starting out in a profession which is being transformed by technological advancements and new ways of practicing law. What advice would you give to Macquarie law students beginning their careers in this environment?

The overarching point is that law students will need to be adaptable, because the legal industry in which they start their careers will be completely different to the industry where they become senior partners. And so, they will need to be more adaptable than any other generation in the past. If you went to law school in the 70s, by the time you became a partner in a law firm, it was basically the same. It will not be the case that in 2050 we practice the law in the same way that we do right now and so adaptability is absolutely key.

The advice for Macquarie law students beginning their careers in this environment is twofold - become curious about something and continue to develop that curiosity. Doesn’t have to be technology; it can be the business of law, it can be in a particular area of law like manufacturing or construction or employment. Become curious about that and dive as deep into it as you can. And once you have an understanding of a particular area of law or a particular interest, you’ll be able to interpret all the changes that happen in the legal industry through that lens so it’s no longer an abstract ‘how is the legal industry changing’, it is ‘how is employment law changing’, and that is relevant because you can then continue to build valuable skills that people will pay you money for, and stay at the forefront of innovation. So, developing and fostering curiosity across a couple of areas that interest you would be the number one thing.

And then the other thing is to connect with as many people as possible. The legal industry has operated in silos, we have built this industry on the adversarial model where people want to withhold all the knowledge and information and not share it with others. I think that is an increasingly old and dying way of practicing the law and it will not allow the industry as a whole to progress and move forward. So what we really need to do is encourage young lawyers and law students to be collaborative and to reach out and connect with as many people as they can to learn about the different areas of law, to understand how different firms and technology companies are doing things differently and then to bring that into their own practice. It’s never been easier to do that with LinkedIn and online conferences and such. And if you want to be successful in the future, you’ll have to be able to collaborate with people and bring ideas from different areas of the industry together to move forward. So, it’d be to get curious, meet lots of people and be adaptable.