Opportunities for law students and early career lawyers in legal tech
The Legal Forecast had an interesting discussion with Jesse Smith of Sky Discovery that touched on e-discovery as an industry, the opportunities for law students and early career lawyers within legal tech, and Jesse’s perspective on the recently concluded TLF Connect mentoring program.
“If you are a law student wondering about technology, or if you have even the slightest interest in technology, then learning about how this applies to the law and vice versa is going to get you a step ahead”.
A few key takeaways:
“TLF Connect is a great touch point for legal tech business owners to keep in contact with that next generation of lawyer who's coming in. They're the ones that we're [legal tech companies] looking to hire over the next few years”.
“You show me the interest and you've got a good shot at coming in and really advancing your career. That said, if you have some sort of formal education with IT and law, you are almost a unicorn”.
Automation is only the first step. Once you automate, “the humans now have that time to look into all the little nuts and bolts of a matter and can provide high level, high end consulting for the client”, which is what clients are asking for”.
How did you start SkyDiscovery? What’s your journey?
I moved to Australia about 10 years ago after the global financial crisis and took the opportunity to do law school here. I ended up attending the University of Technology Sydney and completed a law degree. While I was in law school, I worked as a paralegal, primarily in this bureau e-discovery world, which was a nexus between digital and hard copy. During my practical legal training, I decided to kind of step aside from that and get some exposure to some new areas of law, so I worked in immigration law, contract law and entertainment law for a while, which I thoroughly enjoyed. However, after graduation, I had the opportunity to go back to the company that I had been a paralegal with and take on more of a full time role.
I worked with some great people there, however, after about a year or so there was a group of us who wanted to take the next step in our careers, and we decided to take that step together. We were all entrepreneurs by birth and had the e-discovery experience, so we took time off and went travelling with our families, then we regrouped back in Australia to start Sky Discovery. That was almost five years ago now with our first offices in Sydney and in Melbourne and we have since expanded to Brisbane, Adelaide, India and London too. So we’ve achieved a lot of growth in the last five years from 4 people who originally started the business to now around 25 or 30 people.
That's a true entrepreneurial story and a very inspirational one to anyone in the legal industry given what you and the SkyDiscovery team have achieved in such a short amount of time. Coming back to e-discovery itself, our readers would be interested to know of the type of people that work in e-discovery? What are the opportunities for practising lawyers and law students who are looking to get into e-discovery?
The traditional person who works in Sky Discovery comes from a more technical background, not specifically IT, but those with a kind of database management background. We do see a lot of nexus with forensics, forensic collection and collecting data in that instance, which is the step before the review and discovery phase kicks in which I’ve specialized in. We also do some work around the edges as well. So traditionally, it's been that more tech heavy employee.
However, a large part of our client base are law firms. We do work with corporates and with governments, but law firms are the majority of our client base. We are always in a situation where you're talking with lawyers about litigation matters, and from that perspective, it really helps for our team to have some component of a legal background. You need the technical skills to be able to manipulate the data, process the data and display the data in an efficient way, but as we are dealing with litigation, there's also a need to understand that legal context of everything that's going on. So, having a team that is versed in both sides is ideal. A person who is versed in both sides is an elite candidate and has an edge.
So if I'm a former lawyer who may be a little bit frustrated with the practice of law, or I want to change the way that I work or I want to seek a new opportunity, what are the skills you're looking for? Is it really that sort of technical legal background you need, or is it something that's more of a project manager?
The project manager component is crucial. That ability to speak the language, if you will, with clear concise communication, whether that's on the phone, through email or nowadays Zoom meetings as such. It's so crucial to be able to speak the same language so mistakes aren't made. Mistakes made in e-discovery can have big consequences to a matter, to cost to these types of things. So understanding the directions, around privileged documents, the directions around confidential information and material and those types of things, is crucial. So, the technical area is obviously very important because that's what we're doing in the background all the time, right.
However, those technical skills for a lawyer can be learned and it works both ways as well because the legal skills for a technical person can definitely be learned as well. It's not to say that one has the leg up on the other in any circumstance, but for somebody who has already done a law degree or has practised and understands litigation inside and out, it’s a real step up advantage when you get into e-discovery. A lot of people fall into e-discovery and end up loving it, like I did. You immerse yourself in it, especially of course when you start a business. In that way, lawyers who are in the setting can really leverage the opportunities being offered and upskill rapidly.
What's your advice for young law students or young lawyers who are going through their law degrees right now?
I would have loved a legal technology class in law school. It is kind of a rare find to have a person who has done a law and IT double degree. If I had some advice for young law students who are wondering about technology, or if you have even the slightest interest in technology, then learning about how this applies to the law and vice versa is going to get you a step ahead. But whether you intend to follow a technology focused career or a more traditional legal career, legal technology is here to stay and the more you understand it the better you’ll be placed in the job market.
E-discovery has been around in various forms for the past couple of years. It is probably one of the biggest areas that has seen technology disruption and the litigation process is one of the highest costs for a client. Where do you really see e-discovery going for the future?
There are some amazing e-discovery tools out there and at Sky Discovery, we primarily use Relativity. That's the engine that this company is built on. Those databases and the technology around them is just getting better and better every day and it's really going upward. The trend in the industry is going to be more around streamlining efficiencies in the technology and the automation. We focus on automating those mundane tasks that used to be done by a human, putting software around it and integrating it with our database is crucial and that allows the human to really upskill in the high level consulting area; better able to understand the matter, understanding the complexity of the data.
The humans now have that time to look into all the little nuts and bolts of the case and be able to provide that high level, high end consulting for the client. That's really how Sky Discovery got its start. We saw this gap in the market, and we had clients coming to us saying, "look, I don't need somebody to just load data into the system so I can read it. I need somebody to plan the workflow around reviewing the data from beginning to end and I need somebody to help me on that path in an efficient way." That’s really what we saw the client base clamouring for and we provide an offering that meets that demand.
What keeps you actively engaged and excited in this industry?
Access to justice and problem solving is an area of passion for me, not only as a business owner, but as a lawyer. It's one of my favourite things to discuss. We have a weekly Executives call at Sky Discovery, and not only to we discuss business strategies and large scale planning but we also discuss the intricate day-to-day operations, "what issues have popped up? How can we solve them? How can we make the service more efficient for staff and our clients?"
The answer isn't always throwing money at the problem. Sometimes it's just some good old fashioned critical thinking.
What the traditional barriers that you've been facing with your clients. Legal Tech consulting is still fairly new, so how do you overcome that challenge of really showing the value of what you do?
The cost barrier to certain matters is always going to be there. You really do have to have a matter of substantial size to really leverage the services that we can provide.
Our goal, especially with the smaller matters, is to focus on automation because we really see a huge percentage savings with these matters. So instead of charging two hours of time to perform a task, we've invested the money upfront to build a tool that will do that automatically. Then that person can just come in and do some quality assurance to make sure everything is solid, everything is in order. So they can turn over a lot more of these types of tasks much quicker, and charge a fixed fee which is less than what the cost of doing it on an hourly basis. Clients, especially on smaller matters have loved this structure.
The other thing we embrace at Sky Discovery, and this is not necessarily unique or anything, but that concept of a managed service. Almost working as an in-house department at a law firm and, when you're referring all of your work from your firm to us we can scale that in the cost creating savings for the law firm and for the end client.
For law firms that may have a smaller team in-house or a manager, we can kind of bring them in to what we're doing and give them direct access to our tools to be able to do some of the things and say: "Here's access to our tools for a small monthly fee. You get access to do some of the basic work and we’ll jump in for the more complex needs. Our Managed Service clients can take this and run with it" The benefit of this approach is that we're constantly building new tools; we have a full innovation department here. We work with other software developers as well and bring them in to build and customise. Relativity is an American based platform, so bringing it to Australia requires a lot of customisation and a lot of that traditionally would happen under hourly charges. We didn't see that as an efficient way to bring Relativity to Australia or to grow Relativity in Australia. So, we said, "let's automate a lot of the stuff. Let's make it Australian-ised. Let's build in tools to make this work." So the innovation side is a lot of fun, and we’re able to give the Australian market the best Relativity service available.
I know there’s a lot of lawyers out there, there's a lot of people from all sort s of legal backgrounds who ascribe to the, “making things work” attitude, and enjoy streamlining process. Whether you've worked in a top tier firm or a government agency, you've recognised some inefficiencies in the system. When you can fix those, you sleep very well at night.
What are you looking for in law students and young lawyers if you were looking to hire someone for e-discovery or as a legal tech consultant? What can law students and lawyers really do to make themselves valuable in that sense?
The clear communication skills are probably one of the most important things. The ability to talk to a lawyer about a matter is crucial and understanding the ins and outs of a matter. It's not necessarily needing somebody who already has a lot of technical skills because we can teach that and we're experts in that, that's what this company is built off of.
Everybody who works here, whether they come from a more technical background or they come from a legal background have well developed skills. So when we start looking at bringing in juniors and consultants, graduate type roles, we're looking for people who are just interested in the area and are able to learn from our expertise.
If you have the interest and are willing, then whether you're from a technical background or just straight legal background, you show me the interest, you've got a shot at coming in here and advancing your career. If you have some sort of formal education with IT and law, you are almost a unicorn.
When I went to the University of Technology Sydney, I was more interested in entertainment, law and media law. But working as a paralegal in this industry during law school was excellent exposure to the industry. It's not only just for the juniors coming out of school, but the grads and paralegals who have been working at a law firm for a year or two, I would really encourage them to seek out the litigation support team and see whether there's a matters that e-discovery is required on. Put your hand up to say, “I'll review documents in Relativity, I'll skip through Ringtail, do some relevant Yes / No reviews and some other subjective reviews.”
That's a great way to get your first exposure to it. And once you're familiar with it on a user basis, taking you to the admin level is much easier.
You were a mentor with TLF Connect. So how was your experience with TLF Connect, how was your mentee?
TLF Connect was excellent. My first mentee, Shu, was based in Melbourne. So he's been doing the lockdown a little bit harder than the rest of us. He was great, very interested in technology and very interested as a law student. As a business owner, I can give kind of that side of commercial law from the perspective of running a business. So I was answering questions about: “How does this affect you as a business owner in the legal industry, and how does this affect you in your service delivery to your clients in that sense.” Given Shu was in lockdown, he had a lot of time to research and come up with great questions. I was really impressed. It was a lot of fun. I'll definitely keep doing it. Shu and I are going to keep catching up, even once the TLF Connect program has ended. My second mentee was Chelsea. She’s a student at Sydney Uni so we were able too catch-up face to face and that was excellent. She’s very enthusiastic and has a bright future ahead of her.
I know the purpose of the program is to look into areas that you might have interests in, but I would actually tell somebody to find a mentor from a background in the area that maybe you never had any previous interest in; getting a totally different perspective of something. Maybe it's an area of law that you didn't think you had any interests in or something or a parallel area or something like that. I would actually encourage them to reach out and seek a mentor who isn't just straight in line with what they think right now they want as their career goals. If I had done something like that when I was 19, I guarantee you I never would have found an e-discovery mentor.
Will you be joining us for future phases of TLF Connect?
Absolutely. I want to stay in it and then I'm looking forward to when we can actually start doing more stuff in person.
I really appreciate you guys and what the program is because it's a great touch point for us as business owners to keep in contact with that next generation of lawyer who's coming in. Of my classmates, I was a bit of a mature student when I went to law school in my late 20s, early 30s. But now a lot of my classmates are senior associates and at that kind of level. So I don't get to just go out and have a beer with the graduates and the paralegals as often. I’d like to have that connection with that next generation of kids coming in because they're the ones that we're looking to hire over the next few years. We want to bring in talent at the consultant level and grow them as a lawyer who's interested in technology. The same way as we when we look at people from a technology background that are interested in the law and want to get into that, I mean, it's that interest that's the driver for us.
Thank you very much for your time, Jesse.
Interview conducted on 3 September 2020 by Akaash Singh and Ethan Barr-Hamilton