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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.
Omar Haroun (00:01):
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 theme behind me and all the customers that I'm working with.
Narry Singh (00:15):
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.
(00:38):
Here's the twist. In one episode, I sit down with the 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.
(00:59):
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 over the last 50 years inefficiency isn't just frustrating, it's actually been quite profitable.
(01:17):
In our last episode, we met our Goliath, Rob Beard, former chief legal officer at Mastercard and Micron, and now general counsel at Coherent. Do go back and listen to that episode if you missed it. My David today is Omar Haroun, founder of AI legal startup, Eudia, who took time out of his day at a ranch in remote Montana to join us. Let's get into it.
(01:44):
Omar, I'm delighted to have you here. You are currently in the persona of a David. You founded a legal tech company, and despite all common logic, you founded another one. Why?
Omar Haroun (01:58):
When I sold my last company, Text IQ to Relativity, I had two years to really not only reflect, but also lead AI strategy at Relativity, which is a multi-billion dollar company. So there was an opportunity to really hear and see how the world's biggest companies were thinking about AI post ChatGPT. And just for the last 15 years, I've really been obsessing over this question of what does it take for a David, a new entrant to succeed in a market, where there's a lot of reasons that it's completely irrational for anybody to buy from that new entrant. And yet, when you look at the history of business, there's plenty of stories where that happened. So I can get more into the why and the what, but that was really the background.
Narry Singh (02:44):
Well, I mean, let's definitely get into the why. Was there a particular aha moment for you? And obviously, while you answer that, do let our listeners know a little bit about what Eudia does to put that in context.
Omar Haroun (02:56):
Yeah, definitely. So I'll try to keep it concise. For me, I would say the aha moment was, one, I had this nagging feeling that even though we had had a good financial outcome and our investors had a great return and all of that, we hadn't really done anything to fundamentally change the legal industry. So it's still an industry where 90% of Americans who need legal advice can't afford it. Most people are one legal event away from bankruptcy.
(03:21):
And on the business side, legal is really perceived, for the most part, as a cost center, as a bottleneck to growth, as somewhere where you have to get approvals to do what you really want to do, but ultimately it's not a very strategic function. And I think a lot of the chief legal officers that I've spent time with don't think that way at all and actually are very excited to elevate the whole function.
(03:43):
If you think about what legal does, it's really at the center of everything. And I think it was really this 2023 Goldman Sachs report, which said that 44% of legal tasks can now be automated. I did about 80 interviews with chief legal officers approximately two years ago, and everybody had had that report forwarded to them, in many cases by their CEO or board member. So that really was interesting to me because for the first time ever the chief legal officer themselves were actually confronted with this question and had to have an answer of how they're going to do something about this, which made the market timing feel like really, really good to actually start something new.
Narry Singh (04:18):
Can you just explain to our listeners what Eudia does and why you're seeing traction in the market and then come back to some of the dynamics with the Goliaths?
Omar Haroun (04:26):
Absolutely. So when you look at the general counsel's budget, I'll just start there, 95% to 98% of it is actually going to labor, not to software. And the software budget that exists is mostly keep the lights on type of software, like your billing system and very necessary, but not particularly exciting areas.
(04:47):
And when I really thought about the opportunity here, I first asked myself a question, and I'd love to explore this with you, which is do we believe that AI is the future of software or the future of labor? And the more I thought about it, I really don't think it's the future of software. I think it's the future of labor. So of course, every software company will put AI on top of whatever they've already built, but at the end of the day, if no one's really using that software like it is in the case of legal, most lawyers avoid software or ignore it.
(05:15):
Then really it's all about transforming labor. And so what we've done at Eudia, which I would say is extremely different, is really embrace the human side of this whole equation. And when we say augmented intelligence, we recently announced the acquisition of a 300-person legal services company. These are a lot of former big law attorneys. It was founded by a barrister. So really, really high quality legal talent who's already acting as an extension of the in-house teams of companies like Stripe, Airbnb, Citibank, and so on.
(05:45):
And really the idea is that we're now fully augmenting those humans. So they're using our platform to do every part of their work. They don't bill by the hour. What used to take six hours to review a contract, now takes one and a half hours, and we believe that we can get it down to eventually maybe one and a half minutes. It's just a matter of time.
(06:04):
And so it's really providing not only software, but actually the human coupled with the software. And it's not just a way to really offer a complete alternative to law firms, but also one problem with law firms is all of that knowledge is basically leaving the building. And so this is actually a way to quietly build this kind of brain in the background for your company, while also obviously saving a lot of money and time on legal tasks.
Narry Singh (06:33):
This was something Rob talked about in our first episode. He wanted to build a legal brain, as he called it, at Coherent and Micron that could take their legal team's combined knowledge, documents, context, and preserve it into organizational memory. In fact, this legal brain would actually get smarter over time as more and more data and context and human feedback was provided.
(06:56):
The truth is right now most companies have corporate amnesia. Within legal, the knowledge lives within thousands of inboxes, SharePoints, the heads of legal people who eventually might even walk out the door. An enterprise brain changes that. It's like finally wiring up all these scattered neurons so that the company can actually think as one. Here's more from Rob.
Rob Beard (07:17):
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. 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?
Narry Singh (07:46):
Imagine if you could ask this corporate legal brain, what is our biggest liability risk on the new product we're launching or what might be our biggest legal risk next year in Vietnam? It doesn't just give you documents, it connects the dots and gives you answers. The bottom line is your best people might leave, their judgment doesn't have to. So that's what Eudia is doing, and I want to know more about it.
(08:11):
Omar, people understand when you talk about building an in-house legal brain, which presumably gets smarter over time, why is that such a powerful idea in this space and many other AI applications?
Omar Haroun (08:25):
Absolutely. So I think one thing that even everyone in Silicon Valley is starting to appreciate what everyone's excited about, prompt engineering, but now that's basically been replaced by this concept of context engineering. And whatever term you use, I think the reality is AI has a lot of limitations. As many opportunities as it has, I would say it has an equal number of limitations.
(08:47):
And the biggest limitation is that without context, without really understanding the knowledge that it needs to understand, it's going to be, at best, fairly surface level in whatever it generates or produces. And so most of the time is actually spent trying to find this knowledge that's trapped in people's heads, in somebody's inbox, in a contract that they negotiated three years ago that is living somewhere, but they can't find it.
(09:15):
So unless you actually have a way to really solve that knowledge problem and find a way of actually extracting, codifying and putting that knowledge into one place, which is what we call the brain, for the company, then the AI is not going to be that valuable. But if you do have a way of combining knowledge with AI, suddenly it becomes extremely powerful and relevant.
(09:35):
Just to elaborate a little bit on this context engineering concept, if you look at most organizations, I would venture to guess that a relatively small percentage are responsible for a huge percentage of the progress, the innovative ideas. And if I had a way of scaling their judgment, that would be incredibly valuable.
(09:54):
One of the most interesting experiences I've had in the last couple of weeks is I've been working with a very, very experienced and highly successful, probably top 0.1% litigator and really downloading his brain, so to speak. So really understanding, forget AI, when he's tasked with a very, very high stakes litigation, what is his thought process? How does he go about actually winning the case?
(10:19):
And we spent weeks actually downloading his brain. And once we did that and we paired that knowledge with our AI, we now have, I think, one of the best, most innovative products that's ever existed in the litigation context. Because it's not just what does the whole internet think or what does the thousand of legal cases out there say.
Narry Singh (10:38):
Specific insight from this specific expert.
Omar Haroun (10:41):
Exactly. So I think this idea of not only context engineering, but it's almost like being very thoughtful about the judgment and expertise that you want to scale and over-indexing on that has been a major unlock for myself and a lot of our customers.
Narry Singh (10:56):
Got it. And one of the things that I'm fascinated about is, on your company in particular, Davids aren't what we thought of them 10, 20 years ago, and you just said that you acquired a legal services company that had 300 people. I find that remarkable. I find that fantastic. What led to that strategy and what kind of challenges do you anticipate taking a traditional, I suspect, legal services firm with lawyers and culture and all the wonderful things that come with it into a AI-first tech company?
Omar Haroun (11:31):
I think what led to it is, again, really this recognition that we believe that knowledge workers are going to go through perhaps the biggest change they ever have in the last 100 years. In the next five years, we're going to see more changes than we saw in the last 100 years, I would argue. And really, it's going to be about adapting to doing the work completely differently with an AI-first mindset. And that change probably can't or even shouldn't happen overnight. The pace obviously of the technology innovation has been very rapid, but ultimately we are humans and we need to get comfortable with this. We need to really adapt to what does this look like?
(12:08):
So I think by taking this approach of actually creating perhaps the first fully augmented labor force, it allows us to not only reduce friction, but also minimize change for our customers because for them on day one, they're just getting another legal professional who's reviewing their contracts or who's handling their compliance reviews or whatever the use case may be.
(12:34):
Obviously, for anyone who's curious, and we're very much an open book about metrics and what's actually happening behind the scenes, but the work itself starts to shift quite dramatically. And the customer can feel the benefits of that because they're now getting the contract back in minutes that used to take days. And if they're curious why, we can actually show them. But it doesn't require all the change management that would normally be required for a 600-person legal team to start adopting AI.
Narry Singh (13:04):
Humanity, in my mind, will always be the killer app, and people will prefer, for the most part, in high stakes, high urgency, important decisions to deal with trusted advisors that are not chatbots.
(13:18):
Having said that, I do think that the relationships being caused and created can actually be deepened with AI, ironically. So why do I say that? If you were asked by a client, and the same is true in consulting, if you were asked by a client a phony question, it might take you a week to come back and do some analysis and research. If you and your team are using AI, you could come back in a day.
(13:46):
Now, that is not just productivity, you have a happier client with a more trusting relationship. So the irony is actually AI makes human relationships deeper.
(13:56):
Here's a clip from Rob in which he details the issue with Micron's contract lifecycle management tool and the missed opportunity it presented.
Rob Beard (14:05):
We'd actually just finished a $3 million deployment of a contract lifecycle management tool. And he said, "Well, tell me, what is the worst limitation of liability we've ever given against the business opportunity in terms of all the contracts we've ever signed? What's the worst for us version of this?" So I went to my legal ops team said, "Okay, let's pull this out to 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? I'd like to... This is a big, important negotiation." We hire a bunch of lawyers from Axiom. They could come in and review all our contracts, three weeks, a couple hundred thousand dollars. Negotiation's over, man.
Narry Singh (14:49):
Yeah, exactly.
Rob Beard (14:51):
And so the opportunity, I don't look at that as 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 a massive value add.
(15:02):
With generative AI, I have answered similar questions in an afternoon. 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, here's the reality of that clause and what it means." That's really, really good lawyering.
Narry Singh (15:29):
The truth is most customers still and will continue to feel very comfortable with their regular law firms selling them much better legal services rather than buying legal services from a startup. What's really interesting about Eudia, Omar's company having acquired a traditional law firm, is that it changes the rules of how startups succeed in an AI-first world.
(15:53):
For example, most AI startups, or startups in general, have tried to sell tech to incumbents. Eudia has shown that there could be merit in the opposite. Instead of being an agent, you can actually be the principle. That flips the script on what a business model disruption looks like for startups.
(16:10):
The other point I find interesting is that this is creating a new blend of services and AI software. It isn't SaaS. It's not pure services. It's a hybrid where the service itself is the product. So in many cases, this is service as software, not software as service. And this model, if it works, could spread far beyond legal. It could spread into consulting. It could spread into healthcare, finance, perhaps even government.
(16:40):
I think last year, Omar, you said something which is part of the benefit of the brain and part of the benefit of having some of these law firms be part of Eudia is not only can you help lawyers do more of what they were doing, but I think you've called it two kinds of work. One is do what you're doing today better, but then do new things you couldn't do before. Can you just talk a little bit about the distinction of doing what you do today better, but also being able to do new stuff that you might not even imagine today?
Omar Haroun (17:07):
100%. We have seen these two categories of work. And I think most of the market, even on the technology side, is just trying to help with the first bucket, so how do I offer productivity tools? And there's probably 5,000 companies who can help you with giving you a tool to help redline your contracts as an example, which is great. I mean, obviously I don't at all discount the value of productivity.
(17:28):
I think the more interesting question is whether or not the work we're doing is even the right work for us to be doing. And especially if you believe that over time, the time to review a contract may asymptotically approach zero, then what are these highly trained, intelligent lawyers who actually have a lot of domain expertise and knowledge about a company, how should they spend their time?
(17:53):
And so a lot of the chief legal officers that I've been talking to, including Rob, have actually spent more time on the second category of if you have this AI dividend, like the time that you get back in your day, which maybe today could only be one or two hours, but in six months it might be three or four hours and in 18 months it could be seven or eight hours in your day-
Narry Singh (18:13):
What do you do with it?
Omar Haroun (18:13):
What do you do with it? And I think the part that's really fascinating is the best in-house counsel are actually business people who just happen to understand how to navigate the law. And if you think about it from a CEO perspective, what do you really want from your general counsel? It's actually somebody to help you optimize risk, not minimize risk, help give advice on, "Hey, did you know that when we use this language in our contracts, we're actually more likely to get sued," or, "We close deals much faster," or really insights that actually are more business insights than "legal insights". So that's really where we're going with this technology.
Narry Singh (18:49):
It's funny. Rob said exactly the same thing.
Rob Beard (18:52):
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.
Narry Singh (19:01):
Rob also echoed Omar's point that the real value of AI and legal isn't just financial. It's human. It's about giving lawyers back their time so they can focus on the work that actually matters.
(19:12):
Let's be honest, an AI that replaces an intern might save tens of thousands of dollars a year. Useful, sure. But an AI that frees up 100 hours every few weeks of the top partners or a general counsel team, that's actually potentially priceless. It's not just cost savings. It's unlocking the time to unleash more expertise, more creativity, more judgment at the very top of the profession. It's not the end of legal work. It's the beginning of augmented law, and the same logic applies to many other sectors.
(19:44):
When you meet a chief legal officer and you do your talk and then you leave and they leave, have you found there are certain flags that they share with you that tell you if they're going to be a very good early adopter or is this a giant colossal waste of time?
Omar Haroun (20:00):
Yeah, definitely. I think one thing that I've observed all of our customers and the early adopters have really latched on to the mission more than anything. And their frustration about the law firm bills going up 18% year over year is not just financial. It's actually when you juxtapose that with the law firm putting out press releases about how they're adopting AI, but apparently none of those benefits accrue to the customer, it's very frustrating.
(20:24):
And I think for any of us who've done pro bono work and just seen how the costs and consequences of this system go far beyond inconvenience, and for many people it's a true injustice because they have a valid legal case, they can't afford a lawyer, and the whole system is actually resulting in that. And so I think 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 and that's ultimately locking even consumers out of access to legal services has been a uniting theme behind me and all the customers that I'm working with.
Narry Singh (21:00):
We work with law firms, and our clients certainly obviously work with law firms. These instances of law firms coming in with lower billing rates and trying to be seen as AI-relevant are not as isolated as they were a year ago. General counsels and in-house councils have become quite smart on what this level of automation and large language models can do for them. So they're almost demanding and insisting that to be the bar when they're working with a law firm or an alternate legal service provider.
(21:28):
And this actually is happening a lot more not just in legal, but it is happening a lot more with large IT services companies and BPO companies where clients are saying, "Fantastic. The same 3,000 people that are doing accounts payable for me in Argentina or Brazil or India or wherever, you and I both know that actually with AI, you can get 10, 20, 30% improvements on those people. So Mr. IT services and Ms. Engineering Services CEO, why are you not passing on some of those savings to me?"
(22:01):
Which is one of the reasons we keep saying that having a personal level of AI IQ is mandatory to be in any C-suite right now because otherwise you don't even know what questions to ask your vendors and you're leaving potentially money on the table.
(22:16):
Omar, before we switch to two other topics that I'd love to talk about, is there any other thoughts or comments we've not picked up on your sense as to Davids and Goliaths, what they could be doing differently, misunderstandings, any other kind of tips for the rest of us?
Omar Haroun (22:30):
Yeah, I think the only other thing I would say on the David and Goliath piece is I love the name of the podcast. I think I shared with you, we literally have a AI-generated modern rendition of David versus Goliath as a mural in our office. So as fun as it is to talk in a slightly extreme way about David versus Goliath, I think when you look at the history of where technology's really made a big difference, where the winning companies were emerged out of the Davids, the reality is there's a lot of Goliaths who worked extremely closely with the Davids, and it's really that collaboration and partnership that is by far the best way to derisk on both sides this being successful.
(23:06):
So I think that's maybe the one thing I would just say is it's been incredible working with some of these chief legal officers who are among the most significant and risk-averse executives probably out there. And yet they're still seeing the writing on the wall that AI is about to change everything and therefore finding it necessary to partner with new entrants in this space, and I think that's going to be where we see that magic combination.
Narry Singh (23:31):
This is a fascinating point, and it really comes down to the gist of what this podcast is all about. The Goliath legal teams can employ the Davids to prove our solutions and take the risks. This is not and doesn't have to be a zero-sum game. It's a game in which everyone can thrive and the right risks can be taken by those with the capacity to do so.
(23:51):
I had a really interesting conversation with a very large UK-based global CEO. And we were talking about the fact, and what we were saying was that there are really four things it takes to win in AI from his point of view, and there's about 200,000 employees in his company. One was data. The other one was talent. The third one was compute capacity and an investment capacity. And the fourth one was an AI-first risk-adjusted mindset.
(24:21):
And we spoke for almost an hour, and his general conclusion was that their biggest risk was the mindset and nurturing enough talent. In other words, there was some talent, but not at scale. Does that resonate with your experiences in the UK or more broadly?
Omar Haroun (24:38):
It does. And I would say particularly the last criteria and maybe what you're getting at of how does that change how you even think about talent. I think one of the most interesting things that we're observing now is, even on our team, there's some people who truly are AI-native, AI-first in everything they do. And I mean, it almost is a little bit jarring at first because when you're not used to operating that way and you see how somebody who does operate that way works, it is like a new breed of human, and it's just different.
(25:13):
We have someone who's relatively junior, at least has almost no experience, basically just graduated from university and joined our team. And we're hosting a big industry summit on September 3rd, and it's designed for chief legal officers of large companies, and so the task was can you please go through our database and send invitations to the people that are relevant, which historically would've been, yes, and you start the work, and it takes a long time.
(25:41):
And this person instead basically took a little bit longer to get back to me with an initial response, but came back with a, "Here's the six AI agents that I think we can develop to be able to complete this job, where one of them is going to crawl your LinkedIn network, one of them is going to take your inbox and actually not only identify who those people are, but actually start creating email drafts that mimic your voice when you're talking to somebody like this. We're also going to have a way to generate customized invite codes to waive the registration of people who meet certain criteria."
(26:17):
And it was just a very, very interesting way where once I was able to spend maybe a couple days just to get the whole system right, and then we unleash it and now nobody's doing any manual work, everyone who receives an invite feels like they're getting a very personalized invitation, and it's all AI doing 90% of the work.
Narry Singh (26:35):
I think that's brilliant. And I think it's a very inspiring note because if you just want to think a little bit about how hard it is to change your very own craft when something that this comes along, it takes not only competence, but courage. And I completely, we see it at AlixPartners with our clients a lot, which is not all of us are hit equally with the tsunami, good or bad. So I think that's fantastic.
(26:55):
One of the things Rob and I were talking about that I thought was such an insightful example is there was recently an RFP that we were talking about where they had two or three different law firms submit the quote. And I don't remember the exact numbers, but I think most of the law firms were anywhere between I think 200,000 and 300,000 pounds. And this one law firm came in at close to 100,000.
(27:15):
And they were so intrigued that they called up that law firm and said, "Look, just before we understand, is it apples to apples? Have you guys understood our brief?" And they said, "Yeah, if we are cheaper, it's partly because we are using some incredible technology and AI." And this large company said, "Thanks, but no thanks. We'll go with a little bit more proven human touch."
(27:33):
And I think what was interesting about that was it was quite specific to the chief legal officer that was not ready to take the risk, but also how these things, technology and proven ROI usually take longer to develop into courage in large corporations than startup founders might imagine.
Omar Haroun (27:53):
That's something that we are seeing. I think 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 who have actually made the opposite decision and had much better results and are willing to be the first one to take on a little bit of risk 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 (28:19):
One of the things, Omar, that I love to do with folks in your capacity is if you could no harm, no foul, with zero consequences, advise the chief legal officers of the world's largest companies how to get the most out of startups like yours, and if you were advising them as a friend, not trying to get their business, what would you tell them honestly?
Omar Haroun (28:43):
I think we're not the only company that's taking this approach that I described, which is really this hybrid AI-human combination. I'm very bullish having now seen both models. My last company was a more pure tech approach, I would say, or software approach.
(29:00):
I think the beauty of this new model, and I'm actually sitting here in Montana with several other CEOs of companies in adjacent spaces where they're taking a very, very similar approach of this augmented AI, human-AI combination. I think the really nice thing about it is there's an easy way without necessarily risking a lot to just give it a try by having literally a single small part of your legal work shift over to this model.
(29:28):
And something as simple as NDAs or sales contracts or procurement contracts or compliance reviews, which is one thing where you might already be in the process of hiring a new headcount to do that job or sending work to a law firm, if you just take a little bit of it and allocate it to this new model, what I'm finding is it really avoids all of the IT challenges, all of the change of management challenges.
(29:52):
And it's just very easy to see, okay, let's see two weeks later, did I get the contract back five times faster than I normally did when I do this kind of thing? And if I did, that becomes very interesting and I want to double down. If not, it was a very low cost, low touch type of experiment.
(30:07):
But the nature of the pilot, I think everyone still believes AI is the future of software somewhere in their head. And as a result, 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. Whereas this model really doesn't require a whole lot of change.
Narry Singh (30:21):
Let me just end with two or three things that we always do, which is rapid fire. And please don't overthink these. These aren't meant to be at all intellectual. So let me start with a really important one, which is your favorite fictional lawyer of all time.
Omar Haroun (30:36):
Atticus Finch.
Narry Singh (30:39):
Fair enough. Most underrated skill for lawyers going forward in the next five years?
Omar Haroun (30:46):
Empathy.
Narry Singh (30:47):
Empathy, okay.
Omar Haroun (30:48):
Yeah.
Narry Singh (30:49):
One legal term, or maybe more, that you personally despise and wish would disappear forever?
Omar Haroun (30:55):
It depends.
Narry Singh (30:57):
Mine is NDAs, but that's just me.
Omar Haroun (30:59):
I would say, it depends. It's just a very frustrating answer.
Narry Singh (31:04):
Oh, sorry. That is a phrase. I didn't associate that, but exactly. Whatever the answer is, it depends.
Omar Haroun (31:10):
Yeah.
Narry Singh (31:10):
Brilliant. And if you had to do a little bit of time travel and go ahead five years, what do you think is your moonshot for the legal profession? What do you think is a vision for the lawyer in 2030, 2040?
Omar Haroun (31:24):
I think we will get to a point where the legal advice that currently slows companies down and causes people to make serious financial decisions will now become universally accessible, available. So one, I believe that access to legal services, as we know today, will just become abundant and inexpensive. I think the more interesting part becomes what the role of the lawyer actually is and how that evolves.
(31:54):
And where I see it really going is I think you'll continue to see law firms existing, but they'll mostly be really focused on low volume, high complexity work that draws on deep experience in niche areas that no company has or even wants to have in-house. And then you'll also see the call it in-house counsel, which will basically become a business function.
Narry Singh (32:20):
That's fantastic. Omar, let's leave it there. Thanks again so much.
Omar Haroun (32:23):
Excellent. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.
Narry Singh (32:25):
Thanks.
(32:30):
This has been an incredible conversation. On the one hand, Rob Beard, the consummate businessman who sees law as business-first. On the other hand, Omar, the founder bringing AI to augment legal firms and rewiring how the whole function works.
(32:45):
From these two vantage points, one thing is clear. AI and legal isn't just hype. Yes, it's risky. Yes, mistakes aren't allowed. But when done right and when the stakes aren't critical, it doesn't just save time or cut costs. It can transform legal productivity from a cost center to a really true value creator. The bottom line is, our guests felt AI won't make lawyers obsolete. It will make excuses for inefficiency obsolete. That's a future worth paying attention to.
(33:15):
I wish we could keep going, but that's all for today. Don't worry, we'll be back. Next time we step into the energy sector with a titan of industry, former BP CEO, Lord John Browne of Madingley. And after that, we head to financial services with the Goliath who's transformed one of the world's best known banks, former HSBC COO, John Hinshaw.
(33:39):
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.