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One of the biggest battles in the business world over the past few decades has been between established global companies versus relatively unknown startups. Think about Amazon taking on retailers, or Tesla taking on the automotive industry, or Revolut taking on established banks.
So what can these two very different species learn from each other? ‘When David Met Goliath’ pits startups alongside global giants, digging into how each plays the same game very differently.
In one episode, we sit down with a Goliath. A heavyweight leader from an established global giant. In the next, we bring on a David, a founder from a leading startup in the same space, same industry, same problems, but very different solutions, different playbooks, different styles, and often very different instincts.
The aim is simple: To show that real breakthroughs come when startup hustle meets corporate muscle.
Rob Beard (00:01):
If you're unwilling to embrace AI as a lawyer, you will be a dinosaur and I think you will be out of the industry.
Narry Singh (00:10):
Welcome to When David Met Goliath, a podcast from AlixPartners. I'm Narry Singh. This podcast isn't just another standard leadership interview where we politely nod through the talking points from our guests. We are here to pit Davids against Goliaths, startups versus global giants, and dig into how each plays the same game very differently. Here's the twist. In one episode, I sit down with a Goliath, a heavyweight leader from an established global giant. In the next, I bring on a David, a founder from a leading startup in the same space, same industry, same problems, but very different solutions, different playbooks, different styles, and often very different instincts.
(00:54):
The reason for our podcast is simple. We believe that real breakthroughs don't just come from size or just from speed or innovation, they come when startup hustle meets corporate muscle. I've had the pleasure of being both a David, and more recently a Goliath, so couldn't be happier bringing both these tribes together on this podcast. For our first bearing, we're diving into the legal world. On the surface, law is a profession allergic to change. This is a $900 billion industry where inefficiency isn't just frustrating, it's actually been quite profitable. You are at the beck and call of how many billable hours a lawyer might have or a paralegal might have, and that is absolutely absurd in the age of AI.
(01:39):
My Goliath today is Rob Beard, former chief legal officer at Mastercard and Micron, and now general counsel at Coherent. He's lived the pressure of protecting multi-billion dollar companies, but actually has a rather unique take on legal startups. And in our next episode, you'll hear from the David in our pairing, Omar Haroun, founder and CEO of Eudia, a legal startup trying to rewrite the rules with AI.
(02:08):
So Rob, welcome to David Meets Goliath, and it's great to have you with us.
Rob Beard (02:11):
Thanks. Thank you for having me. It's good to see you again.
Narry Singh (02:13):
I was going to start with the best lawyer joke you know, but maybe we'll leave that for later. But just, you've had a fascinating trajectory. You've done big law, policy, in house, worked with Mastercards, done partnerships with startups. Just talk us through that journey a little bit, what led you through it? Were there some guiding principles? Was there an incredible mentor that you looked up to during this journey? Why are you where you are?
Rob Beard (02:36):
Sure. I went to law school thinking that I was going to be a litigator. And I was really, really fortunate. I went to the University of Illinois for law school, which is a great place and a really great place for me. And I was put in touch with a guy who was a federal judge in Chicago. And this person gave me a job after my first summer of law school. And his name is Wayne Anderson, and he's just an incredible guy, great politician. He is, was at the time and still is, very good at getting people to settle their cases. This was a person who did not like to take cases to trial. Really worked to try to get them to settle.
(03:11):
And I learned a lot from him. But one of the things I learned the most, and he told me one day as we were talking one day, he said to me, "Rob, I don't think you're right for litigation because litigation is all about zero-sum game."
Narry Singh (03:23):
Confrontation as well.
Rob Beard (03:25):
And you seem like someone who wants to build something. And you're looking for expanding the pie, not trying to decide how we're going to divide the pie. And he was right. I really did. That is my personality. And every time I go into a deal today, I think about how can we make this thing really awesome for everybody, not how do we decide who gets what in this situation.
Narry Singh (03:44):
Right. Exactly.
Rob Beard (03:45):
And so that really set my career in a different direction than it would have. Later when I went in house, I think the thing that really made my in house career was something that is very boring and uninteresting, I guess. I joined Micron as their M&A lawyer. So I was doing their deals for them. And I was actually at the office late one night working on... I was selling a manufacturing facility in Singapore, and so I was on some calls in Singapore. And so I was in the office late. And my boss, the general counsel stopped by. Actually my boss's boss, the general counsel stopped by and said, "Do you know anything about this thing called the entity list? You were in DC. Do you know anything about this thing called the entity list?"
(04:25):
And I said, "Well, just a very tiny bit about it." And he said, "Okay. Well, our largest customer, Huawei, was just added to the entity list." Huawei was a 13% customer of Micron. 13% of its revenue went to Huawei. And when Huawei was added to the entity list, that was going to evaporate overnight.
Narry Singh (04:42):
Yeah. [inaudible 00:04:42]. Yeah.
Rob Beard (04:42):
He said, "I got a briefing from our outside council. It sounds like we're not going to be able to sell Huawei anymore. Would you check on that? And tomorrow morning, we need to have a conversation with the CEO." So I stayed up overnight and read some stupid documents. I read all of the export control regulations that I could find. And it occurred to me that the way that the regulations worked is that when an item is controlled in the US under what is called the EAR, it's controlled unless... But it falls out of jurisdiction if it's not manufactured in the United States or doesn't have US content in it.
Narry Singh (05:15):
Sure.
Rob Beard (05:16):
Micron at the time was manufacturing all of its products, and still generally is, was manufacturing all its products in Taiwan and Singapore.
Narry Singh (05:24):
Yeah. Yeah.
Rob Beard (05:25):
And if you know the semiconductor supply chain, well, you'll know there's not a lot of US content-
Narry Singh (05:29):
Yeah. Exactly.
Rob Beard (05:29):
... when you're manufacturing out there. So I called our council, outside counsel the next morning who I'd never met before and I said, "Hey, I'm sorry. I'm an M&A lawyer. I'm sure I'm missing something here because I've never read this stuff before and you're the expert. But our products are made outside the US. How do they fall into the EAR? How do they cover by this?" And she said, "Well, I guess the products actually aren't, but the technology is. You design these products in the US. So if you tell them anything about the product, then you're not going to be able to sell it to them, if telling them about the product is part of the sale process."
(05:59):
I said, "Okay. Huawei is a 13% customer. They know our products really, really well. What if the sales transaction was just they give us a skew and a quantity and we ship? And we don't tell them anything about it."
Narry Singh (06:10):
Yeah, there's no sharing of information, et cetera.
Rob Beard (06:12):
"And we don't offer them warranty support. We don't offer them technical support. We get them to waive all that stuff. What if that happened?" And she said, "Well, I don't think anyone's ever thought about it like that before. But if that was the transaction, I don't think it would be caught by the EAR." So I went and told the CEO. Actually, the call I had with the CEO is I said, "Sanjay, I have a batshit crazy idea for you. And I don't know if it'll work and I don't know if people will be happy about it."
Narry Singh (06:41):
Which is what you want to hear from your lawyer.
Rob Beard (06:41):
Yes, exactly. That's exactly what you want to hear from the lawyers. Usually, we try to stop batshit crazy ideas.
Narry Singh (06:46):
Yeah, yeah. The department of no gone crazy.
Rob Beard (06:47):
But I said, "I got an idea for you. We're going to have to thread the needle in a various number of ways, but I do think this would work." And he said, "Okay." And so we actually went to D-... He said, "You got to come to DC." So we went to DC and actually went to the Department of Commerce and said, "This is how we think your rule works. We think we can do this." And they said, "Yeah, yes, basically you're right."
Narry Singh (07:08):
Right.
Rob Beard (07:08):
And so I flew from DC then to Hong Kong and met with Huawei at the Hong Kong Airport Hotel and told them, "Look, if you will do a transaction like this, if the transaction starts like this, we could start shipping you now."
Narry Singh (07:21):
Right.
Rob Beard (07:22):
And that's what happened. We signed a one page, basically one paragraph document that I drafted in the conference room there and had them print out at the front counter that basically said Huawei waives all its right to technical support and warranty support and all those sorts of things. It was a really interesting thing to do and it was something that I never imagined I would have anything to do with. I used to tell people, I tell people this all the time, I think that was the thing that made my career at Micron. Because from that point on, I got involved in anything big or hairy at all. I was involved in those things. And that enabled me to move up and be promoted and ultimately give the general council role.
Narry Singh (08:02):
And did you know... I mean, Rob, many years ago when we went public, one of our board members was a legendary lawyer called Larry Sonsini.
Rob Beard (08:09):
Oh, yeah. Larry Sonsini is awesome.
Narry Singh (08:11):
And I was too junior to even be noticed by him. But our CEO always said the reason he loved Larry is he was an exceptional businessman who happened to know the law.
Rob Beard (08:19):
Yeah. It's a great way of saying it. And it's actually what I'm looking for when I hire people in house. When I hire outside counsel, I actually want just really good lawyers. I don't need them necessarily to know the business super well. But when I hire people in house, I'm looking for business leaders who look at the world through a lawyer's lens, but they're business leaders first. That's what I'm looking for as a business leader first.
Narry Singh (08:41):
And the funny thing about your example, which I think is really wonderful about Huawei and everything you did is, AlixPartners does a lot of stuff on supply chain risk and optimization. And recently, we've been doing a lot of that stuff on tariff optimization and the interpretation of what is considered a zone of origin.
Rob Beard (09:00):
Yeah, yeah. Country of origin is very interesting.
Narry Singh (09:00):
Country of origin, duty engineering, what parts of IC testing or functional testing you do in Taiwan versus other places. I mean, it's riddled with a lot of technical stuff, but also things that are very open to interpretation.
Rob Beard (09:14):
For sure.
Narry Singh (09:15):
And so I just wonder when we'll talk later today, I just... Given all the stuff around GenAI, which is where we started, do you think GenAI could have come up with this insight that you came up with at night?
Rob Beard (09:27):
Yeah. I mean, I would have loved to have GenAI available to me back then because I think what I would have probably wanted to do is I would have asked GenAI to summarize-
Narry Singh (09:37):
Yeah, yeah. What you had to read.
Rob Beard (09:38):
... what I had to read, speed that up, and then I could dive into different pieces of it, I think.
Narry Singh (09:48):
The idea of collaboration versus having a zero-sum mindset between a David and a Goliath is a really interesting one. It might seem counterintuitive, it might seem alien, but the truth is this is not zero-sum. This podcast is about the idea that winning isn't always about the other person losing or having to give something up. Rob is a great case in point. He's a natural problem solver. It's made him a great lawyer at some truly global Goliaths. Speaking of which, I wanted to dive into the meat of this podcast and ask Rob specifically about the differences in mentality between a David and a Goliath when it comes to the legal space.
(10:26):
Mastercard, Micron, Coherent. These are, relatively speaking, big, established, amazingly reputable companies. But you've also been wonderfully sneaky at bringing in some of the most amazing startups in terms of this innovation. And one of the things that I love to explore is, what do these two species not really get about each other?
Rob Beard (10:47):
Yeah. I think, for me, large companies in particular have a challenge working with startups, right?
Narry Singh (10:53):
Right.
Rob Beard (10:54):
And I think actually the more successful the company is, the harder it is for them to get cool with working with a startup with a nobody name, right?
Narry Singh (11:01):
Right.
Rob Beard (11:02):
But those startups, they're bringing a new way of looking at things to the table. And they have the ability to think about the world or think about our problems without the baggage of calcified lines of the way we do it. And so that's why I've always been a fan of trying to find ways to bring them in. It can be really challenging. There are things that you have to overcome. I won't name company, but I was at a place one time where I really wanted to bring it in a startup to help us do something in the legal space and I couldn't get IT's buy-in on it because they don't have the same security protocols that we do and it's too hard to let them into our environment. And like, okay, but there's some way we can take some risk here, good risk, smart risk. But if we take no risk in these things, we're never going to grow either.
(11:54):
I don't think it's reasonable to say we're going to do everything organically and we're going to jump leaps and bounds by doing everything organically. We need these startups out there. And there's lots of type of different ways people do this. One of the ways that I've always thought was really interesting is Cisco. Cisco had this great concept called a spin in. So what they would do is they would take these ideas that would germinate at Cisco that didn't make any sense at Cisco, probably didn't make any sense at Cisco. And they would spin those things out and they would give them a little bit of funding just to get them off their feet. And they would tell the people that go with these things like, "You're not coming back. You're going to this startup." They would have to go make it work.
(12:37):
But they would keep a little position and/or sometimes a bigger position in these things. And some of those things were really interesting.
Narry Singh (12:43):
[inaudible 00:12:44].
Rob Beard (12:43):
And they did become really interesting to come back into Cisco. And I think that was... I don't mean this as anything negative about Cisco because I think this is a brilliant idea. But those ideas weren't going to germinate within Cisco. They weren't going to get beyond that first phase because that's not what that company is.
Narry Singh (12:59):
Right. So just talking about your IT example of it not being in our environment and cyber concerns and all these things. I mean, it can sound pretty scary if you're in the legal team wanting to do something innovative and the IT person says, "This is going to blow up everything." So what are some of the other challenges? In other words, in that situation, how did you resolve it? Does it actually come down to, "No, we're going to do it and you tell me how and I'm going to pull rank." Or is it a campaign of hearts and... I mean, how do you overcome some of these challenges?
Rob Beard (13:31):
Well, I'm not a pull rank person. And I don't know if I have any rank to pull. But even if I did, that's not my style. But ultimately, to do this, you have to take a little bit of risk. And in order to take risk, I think you need to... It's always the balance on the scale, right? It's, is the risk worth the potential reward? And so you've got to show people that vision of the future that's incredibly rewarding so they're willing to take a little bit of a risk. Proof of concept is a great way to do that. So the way that I have overcome this once before is, going back to that M&A example I gave you, I was trying to think of like, how can I get AI in here and show people what it can do without exposing our data to this startup, right? Because that was the problem. And then to realize that, well, in every M&A transaction we do, the target puts their stuff in a box. It's not our box.
Narry Singh (14:22):
Yeah. It's theirs.
Rob Beard (14:23):
It's a box. And they allow our advisors and our lawyers and other people to access that. So that's why I ran a proof of concept. I said to my legal team, I said, "We're going to use AI to do the due diligence, to do the contract summary due diligence on this thing. But we're not only going to use AI. Let's use the law firm the way we would normally do." The only difference is I asked them to bill us by task and then we gave the same instructions to the law firm and the AI tool. And it was really interesting. What we got back from the AI tool was actually better than what we got back from the lawyers in terms of the summaries because it was consistent, right? When you farm it out to a law firm, you get first and second year lawyers doing it, many of them.
Narry Singh (15:05):
Correct.
Rob Beard (15:05):
It's inconsistent wording and language.
Narry Singh (15:06):
It's humanity. Yeah.
Rob Beard (15:07):
And they interpret things slightly differently, right? We got better summaries. But here's what was really fascinating. It wasn't a blind thing, right? It couldn't be a blind thing. And so my team that was assessing it was actually more harsh on the AI tool, even though it was better. And the reason why they're more harsh is they said, "Well, it's just a summary. They just gave us a summary of the stuff in the data room. What's special about that? The lawyers did that too." And I said, "Well, what would you want from them? If you could get whatever you want, what would you want?" And they said, "Well..." I won't reveal what it was we're looking at. They said, "There's some specific things that we would really like to understand from these contracts, but we wouldn't give that to a first or second year lawyer at a law firm because they wouldn't understand what we're looking for."
Narry Singh (15:49):
It requires a lot more expertise and nuance.
Rob Beard (15:50):
So I said, "Well, why don't we try that with the AI?" So we tried the AI tool with that. And over the weekend, they came back with something that was one step beyond what the law firm could give us.
Narry Singh (16:02):
Interesting.
Rob Beard (16:03):
At a very, very low cost.
Narry Singh (16:07):
So the point that Rob made about Cisco's model of innovation, this is a phenomenal example that has actually worked quite well amongst large tech. And the reason it's worked well is because most self-aware CEOs and leadership at a large company will recognize that they do certain things really well. They have structure, they have rigor, they have organizational operating models, they have processes. What they don't want to do is to take that and unleash that on a startup where it is exactly the opposite in many ways. And what we've typically found is that no matter how good the idea, if it's within the existing structure, chances are the antibodies of the mothership will find a way to kill it.
(16:50):
So what it means in the legal sector is, obviously legal is an area where you don't want to take too many crazy risks and have moonshots. So what companies have done quite successfully in legal is experiment and control sandboxes. So they will take a certain process within legal or discovery or what have you, and it's quite bounded. And in a sandbox, they'll experiment with AI and see if the numbers look better, if the lead time looks better, if the efficiency of the answers looks better. Taking risks and embracing new technology like AI internally or spinning it out, as was the case with the Cisco example, allows you to control the product, the talent you hire, the investment you want to make, and even the outputs.
(17:33):
One of those outputs is around cost. And being honest, the fact that a well-implemented AI won't, or at least shouldn't simply be about cost savings is a key point that Rob made.
Rob Beard (17:43):
When I go talk to CEO or CFO about what we're doing with AI, I'm not talking about all the different ways we've messed up the model and we've moved this back.
Narry Singh (17:54):
Yeah, exactly.
Rob Beard (17:55):
But what I'm telling them is, "I'm going to deliver AI to you cost neutral, and then you're going to start seeing-"
Narry Singh (18:01):
And reliable.
Rob Beard (18:02):
"And reliable. It's going to be the same level of quality or better than you'd have today. And then you're going to start seeing the cost declines over time." I think where some chief legal officers might be tempted, and I think is a mistake, is to go in and tell your CEO, "I'm going to use AI and it's going to be cheaper for you this year." In my experience, it's a couple years of really... And it'll get better as more and more people do it well.
Narry Singh (18:27):
That's such a good point. Yeah. It's not an overnight thing.
Rob Beard (18:28):
But it's like, let's find a way to do it now at a cost neutral. Let's work AI in, get better and better at using it, and then you'll see the cost decline in the future.
Narry Singh (18:35):
And I think the technology's changing literally every week.
Rob Beard (18:37):
If you're unwilling to embrace AI as a lawyer, you will be a dinosaur and I think you will be out of the industry. And I give you an example. When I graduated law school... I graduated law school in 2008. When I graduated law school, many law firms-
Narry Singh (18:51):
Great time looking for a job.
Rob Beard (18:52):
Yeah. Well, I was very lucky. I went to clerk on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, so I was very fortunate that I had something lined up in government coming out of law school. But when I graduated in 2008, every law firm had a large law library and librarians in that law library. And what they did is they, for the large part, when you're looking for case law and other things like that, you were going and pulling books off the shelf and looking. But a few years prior to that, a couple of disruptive technology platforms came into existence, Lexis and Westlaw.
Narry Singh (19:23):
Lexis. Yeah.
Rob Beard (19:23):
Right? And with Lexis and Westlaw, you could get that same information that you could get from the books online, no matter anywhere where you are in the world, as long as you could log into it. You didn't need the law librarian, right? You didn't need the law library. You didn't need photocopies of things. And so the lawyers who embraced Lexis and Westlaw became better lawyers in two ways. First, they will be much more responsive. They could do something on a Friday afternoon or evening or a Sunday morning or whatever without having to go to the office. That's number one. But number two, the information they got back from Westlaw and Lexis was better than the information they would get going and looking in the law library because it was capable of gathering more information if you got good at searching.
(20:09):
If you're a terrible searcher in Westlaw, you're going to get good results. But if you got good at searching, you get great results. That's a new tool, a new skillset for a lawyer to have is Boolean searching Westlaw.
Narry Singh (20:22):
Completely. But how many librarians exist in law firms today?
Rob Beard (20:25):
Very few. But if you're a lawyer and you rely on those librarians now, you're a dinosaur.
Narry Singh (20:30):
Correct.
Rob Beard (20:30):
You are probably not kicking ass in the law firm world because you didn't adapt. I want more lawyers to practice law, not do things that aren't the practice of law. And I think that's what AI is doing really. AI is going to do the things that aren't really the practice of law and allow us to practice law.
Narry Singh (20:54):
Rob's approach to AI is very logical, but a little surprising. In a field where mistakes simply are not allowed to happen, implementing AI can be seen as a high stakes endeavor. So how does Rob, working at an established Goliath, square the circle of AI's potential with also its inevitability of being unreliable at times?
Rob Beard (21:15):
There's been some sensationalized uses of AI in legal work where the AI hallucinated or the lawyers were caught using it in a way where something maybe was ineffective in some way or there was something that would-
Narry Singh (21:31):
Or like randomly made up case law-
Rob Beard (21:32):
Cases and stuff like that. Yeah.
Narry Singh (21:33):
... and case studies and things like that. Yeah.
Rob Beard (21:35):
And so because of those sensationalized things, I think there are some people who are afraid of it. And that's why I come back to, I don't want AI to make decisions for me or solely do stuff for me. I want to keep humans in the loop. It's humans augmenting themselves with AI. It's the same way. As a lawyer, I think about AI like a first or second year lawyer at a law firm.
Narry Singh (21:58):
Right. Yeah.
Rob Beard (21:59):
I would give AI the same task.
Narry Singh (22:01):
We had some interns a year or two ago and now the interns are getting quite smart.
Rob Beard (22:03):
Yeah, yeah. I would give them the same task that I would give a first or second year lawyer at a law firm. Now, if I were in a litigation matter, would I ask my second year lawyer at a law firm to draft a brief, me not look at it and turn it into the court? Of course not. We're not yet at a place where the models have been trained well enough where the refinement that needs to happen has happened. But that refinement will never happen if we don't actually use that. So it's using it to the degree we can use it today and ever marching forward in terms of the capabilities that we can give to it.
Narry Singh (22:36):
But also, in my profession, a little bit like yours in services, if you did allow GenAI to take it from womb-to-tomb and submit it, I mean, you're just a crap lawyer. It's almost being lazy, right? So you would never allow that. So are you finding examples of that happening in the law industry where people are just basically saying autonomous legal stuff is going to be self-driving?
Rob Beard (22:57):
No, I don't think so.
Narry Singh (22:59):
It is mostly augmentation, isn't it?
Rob Beard (23:00):
Yeah. I mean, I think these big sensationalized cases have helped with that. But I also think one of the impediments to AI adoption in the legal world is that many lawyers think... And I apologize to all the lawyers or the 10 lawyers that will listen to this or whoever many.
Narry Singh (23:20):
We've got 14. There's a [inaudible 00:23:22].
Rob Beard (23:21):
Okay. Sorry. Sorry to the dozen. A lot of us think we're pretty special. And we think the work we do is special. And it's really interesting. I mean, I don't want to get way off course here, but I find it really interesting, like this concept around the practice of law, and what is the practice of law. For me, looking at a contract and summarizing, it is not practicing law.
Narry Singh (23:45):
It's not tradecraft. Yeah.
Rob Beard (23:46):
It's not special, nor is writing up a deal onto a napkin or a piece of paper and saying, "Okay, this is the document that we're going to use to govern our deal now." But saying, "Okay, that clause in that agreement you just wrote means this in court," that's practicing law.
Narry Singh (24:02):
Yeah. Got it. So if you were advising your 30 or 20 year old self on what skills to really master for the next 10 years in the legal profession, what would they be?
Rob Beard (24:13):
I would really want to know how do I maximize AI in the sense of how can I augment myself with information? How can I use AI to bring me things and do things for me that I don't have time to do myself or money to do myself? And then how can I take that information, ensure that I feel good about it, and then give great actionable advice to the business based on that? And there's tons of examples about this, but another one going back to my time at Micron, which is really when I first started thinking about generative AI is, I was at Micron and we were negotiating a deal with a potential customer. And this was a very large potential customer with a lot of leverage in the negotiation.
(24:58):
And that potential customer said... And I think we were selling SSDs. We were going to sell SSDs to this customer. And the customer said, "We'll buy from you and we'll sign the supply agreement, but the supply agreement has to have a term in it that says you will take on unlimited liability for damages that we incur if anything goes wrong with your device. So we put your SSD in the data center and it explodes and takes down our whole data center-"
Narry Singh (25:22):
It's your problem.
Rob Beard (25:23):
"... it's all your problem." And so the head of our business units group, our chief business officer came to me. We had actually just finished a $3 million deployment of contract lifecycle management tool, which was really exciting and everyone's really geeked about. And he said, "We've got this new contract lifecycle management tool. Will you tell me what is the worst limitation of liability we've ever given against the business opportunity that was available?"
Narry Singh (25:49):
You mean like quantify it? Like how bad could it get?
Rob Beard (25:51):
No, no. Just in terms of all the contracts we've ever signed, what's the worst for us version of this against the business opportunity that was available to us? I want to see like, in the risk pantheon, where does this fall?
Narry Singh (26:04):
What's the cost benefit ratio with this thing? Yeah.
Rob Beard (26:06):
And so I said, "Cool. Let's go do this." So I went to my legal ops team, said, "Okay, let's pull this out of CLM." And they were like, "Actually, we can't do that. Our CLM isn't set up that way. We haven't coded that thing that you're looking for and you have to code everything when you put it in CLM." And so I said, "Well, okay, how are we going to figure this out? This is a big, important negotiation." They said, "Well, we can hire a bunch of lawyers from Axiom." Which Axiom is awesome, by the way. "We'd hire a bunch of lawyers from Axiom. They could come in and review all our contracts." And I said, "Okay, find out how long that would take." Three weeks, couple hundred thousand dollars. Negotiation's over, man.
Narry Singh (26:41):
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Exactly.
Rob Beard (26:42):
And so the opportunity, I don't look at that as like a risk, right? Because previously, nobody was able to give the chief business officer that information either. But we missed an opportunity for legal to be massive value add. With generative AI, I have answered similar questions in an afternoon.
Narry Singh (27:00):
Really?
Rob Beard (27:01):
And that is an opportunity for the legal team to be value add, but even better than answering questions. If I got a really creative lawyer who's out there negotiating those deals with the business, they can go get all that information and bring it to the meeting so they don't even have to be asked for it. They could say, "Okay guys, well, I'm going through the markup here. And this thing, here's what we've done historically and here's where we've been successful in negotiating this thing. And here's the number of times we've actually triggered this thing. And here's the reality of that clause and what it means."
Narry Singh (27:32):
So we're not being reasonable.
Rob Beard (27:34):
That's awesome lawyering, right? That's really, really good lawyering.
Narry Singh (27:37):
That's amazing. Courtesy of Micron law or whatever-
Rob Beard (27:40):
Courtesy of... That's right.
Narry Singh (27:41):
... the brain would be called.
Rob Beard (27:41):
Yeah.
Narry Singh (27:42):
I mean, Rob, obviously being in house is very different than in the law firms. But just from a law firm point of view, are you seeing a race to arms on AI? And I'll share something that happened that was remarkable. I think it was remarkable last week, which is, a client of ours said they had a piece of legal work that had to happen and they got a few proposals. They mentioned two. The upper end was, I think it was 300,000 pounds to do the piece of work. And a reasonably well known large law firm, not that one, came back with 90,000. And they were curious and said, "Well, that's a pretty big gap in a services industry."
(28:23):
And the law firm, who you know, said, "The reason we can offer this amazing rate is because we are using a lot of GenAI." And I think they heard the phone click and the person said, "No, no, good for you, but we're not really ready for that level of automation."
Rob Beard (28:39):
I mean, that's batshit crazy.
Narry Singh (28:39):
That's batshit crazy. But my point is, I mean, in a way, you can almost sympathize and not blame this client of ours.
Rob Beard (28:46):
Yeah, yeah. Of course.
Narry Singh (28:47):
But irrespective of the productivity improvement of law firms and doctors and radiologists, are there buyers ready for this level of automation on the buying side?
Rob Beard (28:56):
Sure. I think there are. So a couple of things. It's interesting, some of my peers have outside counsel guidelines. And when I joined Coherent actually, our outside counsel guidelines, which is the rules that you make your outside counsel agree to when they work for you, actually said that you will not use AI to do your work, right? So there are people who are still... And until nine months ago when I joined Coherent, Coherent was still telling the law firms, "You can't use AI to do the work." There are a lot of people that aren't ready for it. And I think a lot of that stems from these.
Narry Singh (29:28):
So they were prohibited from using.
Rob Beard (29:30):
Yeah, yeah. I mean, basically that's effectively what your story described there is, well, if you're going to use AI, we're going to go with the other guys, right?
Narry Singh (29:35):
Yeah. That wasn't just some high street solicitors. It was a pretty well known international established law firm. You really do have to hand it to them for taking the risk even if the market wasn't ready just as yet. At the end of the day, law firms, just like many other services companies, can see the writing on the wall. The example I gave where the law firm came up with 50% of the competitors bid. The law firm actually had said, "As part of this bid, we will have ongoing access to your case information."
(30:08):
Now, we didn't talk about that much. The reason that is important is because if they have that data connectivity and stickiness with the client ongoing, what happens with their AI models is if they get asked and queried about the same topics that use the same data, the law firm is getting incrementally smarter as well as the client. So it's not economic suicide. It was quite an intelligent bid that said, "I'll discount, but I need more access to your data more often," and that's the quid pro quo here. The truth is, in most large organizations, change takes a lot more than most people realize.
(30:44):
So you have to keep building these micro wins that give the broader audience courage to make massive change happen with AI. And people like Rob are a key part of that. When Rob joined Coherent, there was actually a blanket ban on AI enabled legal work. That's changed. Rob's been working with a firm called Eudia who specializes in using AI for legal tasks. In fact, their founder, Omar Haroun, is going to appear in our next episode of this podcast. So from the perspective of an outside organization trying to crack legal amongst the Goliaths, what does the field look like? Here's an interesting clip from Omar.
Omar Haroun (31:21):
It's a very complex undertaking. There's a lot of fear. There's a lot of risk. There's a lot of change management. What I predict, and you can hold me to this over the next, call it 12 months, is that what it really takes is enough examples of customers that are willing to be the first one to take on a little bit of risk and add much better results for the rest of the market to quickly respond. So I think we are going to see that in the next 12 months.
Narry Singh (31:49):
Rob was one of these early adopters who signed up with Eudia. In fact, he can claim some small credit for the company's improved approach based on his feedback.
Rob Beard (31:59):
An awesome thing about startups, I think more generally, but Omar and David and Ashish specifically, I think, really caught my eye here because what they were willing to do was listen to what I needed and help build something for me that we could scale out, rather than what I'm more used to in the legal tech space, which is somebody builds a software product and sells it to me and now I got to figure out how to deploy it. This was like the opposite. This was bottoms up. And I met some of their funders early on and I said, "If you guys can be patient with these guys-"
Narry Singh (32:30):
Yeah. They're doing it the right way.
Rob Beard (32:31):
"... you're going to build something really cool here." So what Eudia does for us... The company is Eudia, E-U-D-I-A. What they do for us is they're actually embedded in our team and they are helping us discover use cases for AI. And they have a platform, a technology. And then as we find those use cases, we merge them, we bring them over to Eudia. They help us figure out how to operationalize those things. And then we know as we... We're in the process of doing this now. We haven't done it yet. But then we'll return them to the company. So we figure out how to like... Some of it, we're going to always have them do for us as a service, right? And some of it, we're going to return to the company and teach our people how to use the tools so they can do some of these things.
Narry Singh (33:11):
Great.
Rob Beard (33:12):
And the cool thing about working with those guys and why I've really liked this with them is that we are failing all the time. We are trying different models and it doesn't work. And so we're going to try something else. Because so much of using generative AI in an in house legal team is about change management. It's not about can the tool do the job. AI is advanced far beyond what I'm asking it to do. But it's how do we get it to work within our team and how do we get our people to use it? How do we find a cost model that gives the providers enough incentive to come sit with us for two years and develop something for us? But then how do we also see the cost reductions of that after we've refined them all?
Narry Singh (33:51):
Yeah. Exactly.
Rob Beard (33:51):
Building that together. One thing that was really fun for me this year was, they sent me a contract, basically like, "Here's the contract we want to use." No chief legal officer in the world would have signed that thing. And so it's like... But I realized like we're creating a new category of service.
Narry Singh (34:09):
What was the most outrageous thing in that contract [inaudible 00:34:11]?
Rob Beard (34:11):
Oh, I don't know there's anything outrageous, but it was-
Narry Singh (34:12):
Wasn't traditional.
Rob Beard (34:14):
... more based on sort of like a software type deployment or something like that. And that's not what this is. And particularly when you're having somebody do stuff that is adjacent to legal work, you want to be able to keep all of that stuff so that you can feed it back into your brain. And so figuring out how to make all that work and come up with a contract that was great for me to sign, but not only that, but then they could actually give to other chief legal officers and they'd be like, "Okay, yeah, this makes sense. We've thought through all these things." So it's a little bit of a co-creation and it's really-
Narry Singh (34:45):
Yeah. And creativity.
Rob Beard (34:46):
Yeah. And it's really worked well for us because we're creating together something that's going to augment my team and make us better lawyers. And they're creating something that is a basis, and we've already seen that with other of their customers, a basis for them to then scale out based on something that really works.
Narry Singh (35:08):
We're going to move on from AI. Since leaving Micron and Mastercard, Rob has joined Coherent as their chief legal and global affairs officer. As well as being a fresh challenge, this role allows Rob to indulge in his love for the UK. I asked Rob to explain both, what Coherent does and why they have chosen to be UK centric at a time when many haven't?
Rob Beard (35:29):
So Coherent is a company that manufacture... We're a photonics company. We manufacture optical devices that move information around the data center from data center to data center. And we have a huge datacom and telecom business. Footprint is US R&D, some US manufacturing, and then Asia assembly and test. We also have a whole other side of the business that's the industrial side of the business. This is lasers that are used to do all kinds of things in the industrial space. Cutting, welding, fusion, power, like really cool, interesting stuff. And then bio stuff, mapping neurons in a brain, watching the neurons fire as a mouse runs a maze, for example, and learning from that.
(36:08):
That business is headquartered in Glasgow. And it's really interesting. The UK is a fantastic place to... Well, both for R&D, but also what I think a lot of people miss is manufacturing. And there's a lot of very high-tech manufacturing that I think is perfectly designed and suited to the UK because the UK is cost competitive with other places around the world on some of this high-tech R&D and manufacturing.
Narry Singh (36:33):
So this is like super high end [inaudible 00:36:34].
Rob Beard (36:34):
So I'll share our example, for example, right? So we're located in Glasgow. Up in Glasgow, there's a couple universities that are really important. There's Strathclyde and there's the Glasgow.
Narry Singh (36:43):
Right.
Rob Beard (36:44):
Right? Those schools have physics departments that the government has invested in over time. Those physics department produce physicists that we then can hire and turn into engineers to design and manufacture our lasers, which is a very high touch process. And the price we pay for those people coming out of university in Glasgow is actually close to the price that we pay for somebody coming out of university in China-
Narry Singh (37:11):
Right. Wow.
Rob Beard (37:12):
... to do the same thing. The reason why that's possible is because it's less expensive to operate in somewhere like Glasgow, right? And the government has invested in those physics departments and they're cranking out a great talent pipeline for us. To create what we've created in Glasgow is cost competitive with anywhere in the world.
Narry Singh (37:30):
That's amazing. There's a lot more to discuss there, but that's really a useful insight. Can we end with just a few rapid fire questions, whatever comes to mind?
Rob Beard (37:38):
Sure. Yeah.
Narry Singh (37:38):
These aren't deeply intellectual. So...
Rob Beard (37:40):
Okay.
Narry Singh (37:41):
One legal term you would wish would disappear forever.
Rob Beard (37:44):
Oh my gosh. One legal term I wish would disappear. I'll cheat and say risk. I hate that the lawyers... I hate when we just talk about risk. I think it's balance of risk and opportunity. So I wish risk as a standalone concept would go away. And when we talk about risk, we would talk about opportunity. Because if there's risk, the other side of the coin is always opportunity.
Narry Singh (38:08):
Yeah. Got it. Okay. I've had this really stubborn opinion for the last three decades. I've never been really thankful that I signed an NDA. Do they exist? Do they work? Why are we still doing them?
Rob Beard (38:20):
Yeah. Everybody says that until there's some IP contamination issue that torpedoes their company, right?
Narry Singh (38:27):
Right.
Rob Beard (38:28):
NDAs are important. I think fighting about NDAs though is not super important. It's interesting. I don't know if you know this. But in the UK, there's some companies that have come together to create a real mutual NDA that they all agree on the terms.
Narry Singh (38:41):
Like a standardized NDA.
Rob Beard (38:42):
Correct.
Narry Singh (38:43):
Oh, amazing.
Rob Beard (38:43):
And I think something like that's really interesting.
Narry Singh (38:45):
Got it.
Rob Beard (38:46):
At the end of the day, unless you're nefarious and then I don't want to deal with you, you're not trying to send your... When we're doing a partnership, you're not trying to contaminate me with your IP so that you can take me out of the market-
Narry Singh (38:57):
Correct.
Rob Beard (38:57):
... sometime into the future. Assuming that fact is true, there's an NDA that we should be able to sign in 30 seconds.
Narry Singh (39:03):
Yeah, yeah. And it should be a given. You almost know what's in it, as what's-
Rob Beard (39:05):
Yeah.
Narry Singh (39:05):
... the mystery of it. Great. Biggest myth about lawyers that you secretly agree with.
Rob Beard (39:11):
Ooh, that I secretly agree with. Myth.
Narry Singh (39:13):
Myth. Maybe stereotype.
Rob Beard (39:15):
Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to get a little bit serious here. A lot of lawyers are... There's a myth about lawyers or thought about lawyers that we're not really happy in our jobs. There's a lot of substance abuse in the legal profession. And a lot of people struggle with mental health and mental illnesses.
Narry Singh (39:31):
Right. Yeah.
Rob Beard (39:31):
And I do think that is true. I think you see that a lot. And I think a lot of it is... I'm going to pivot a little bit back to AI here. I think a lot of that has to do with some of the uninteresting, repetitive tasks we have to do as lawyers that are not the reason why we went to law school, and not the reason why we joined.
Narry Singh (39:47):
They don't bring joy. Yeah.
Rob Beard (39:48):
It bring no joy. Don't feel like they advance the world at all. And I think, as lawyers, one of the things we have to do is figure out how to make the profession better and more interesting in that way.
(39:59):
But we also need to recognize that this is a real thing, right? The stereotypical lawyer who gets busted for drink-driving multiple times and has to go to rehab or whatever. Those things are real and they're prevalent enough in our profession that we should be thinking about why.
Narry Singh (40:16):
That's sobering. Last question. Who was your favorite fictional movie or TV lawyer of all time?
Rob Beard (40:24):
Oh, fictional TV lawyer. I mean, Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise, very good, right? I mean, getting the Code Red admission on the stand is pretty fantastic. So Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men, really, really great lawyer. Excellent JAG lawyer.
Narry Singh (40:39):
Excellent. Well, hopefully the audience can handle the truth. Rob, it's a pleasure to have you.
(40:49):
Rob's story is an amazing tale of courage and calculated risk taking in a culture that very often is not. He is also on the button when it comes to developments in the AI space and is not scared to back a horse he sees as a winner. Startups like Eudia, whose founder and CEO, Omar Haroun, we'll be interviewing for episode two to get the David's take on AI in the legal space.
Omar Haroun (41:13):
A recognition that there's an opportunity to not only have your team elevated and do better legal work, but actually fix an industry that's really profiting off of inefficiency has been a uniting game behind me and all the customers that I'm working with.
Narry Singh (41:27):
This has been When David Met Goliath. I'm your host, Narry Singh from AlixPartners. You can find out more about everyone involved with this podcast in the show notes. If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe on your podcast app of choice. Thanks for listening.