Access, Innovation, and Resilience with Tom Macintosh Zheng

Welcome to studying law around the world. I'm Claudio Claus. In each episode, I talk with lawyers, law students, and professors from different parts of the world to talk about legal education, careers, and what the profession looks like in real life. We talk about the hard parts, the surprises, and the decisions that shaped their paths. Whether you're planning to study abroad, thinking about working in another legal system, or just curious about how law works around the world, this podcast is for. You. So many of the guests on this podcast have talked about how important it is to have strong writing skills as a lawyer. It's true, written communication is essential in this profession, but it can also be one of the trickiest skills to master. If you find your writing feels a bit clunky, or you're getting a lot of edits on your work, or perhaps you're breaking into an English speaking jurisdiction for the first time, Grammatica International can help. I'm Rebecca Lockwood, the lawyer, mediator and educator behind Grammatica, and we help lawyers and law students to write more sharply, speak more clearly, and advance their careers with group training and one-on-one skills coaching designed just for legal professionals. I have worked with so many lawyers like you who are exceptionally smart, qualified and capable, but need a bit of guidance to stand out in a competitive legal market. And I get it myself, having lived and worked in five countries during my 17 years in law and education. Whether you're looking to sharpen your writing skills generally, refresh your CV, or draft an application for a law program, Grammatica can help. Visit gramatica.co to learn more. Today I have a special guest here I have torn McIntosh saying he will be speaking about his experience in England, Canada and also now as an entrepreneur. Thank you so much for joining us today. Than well, thank you very much for having me Claudio. It's a look forward to talking to you about my experiences. Amazing. And just started off. I'd love to hear a little more about your story. So can you introduce yourself to your audience and also share a little bit about this journey, you know, Losco practice and quadratic dots? Right, so I'm currently a legal tech entrepreneur. My goal is to make it easier for Canadians to access and use our civil litigation system and I have been building several tools aimed at achieving that. But before switching into this, I was a commercial litigation lawyer for over 4 years in Toronto. I first started at a boutique called Laxdal Sullivan Lysis Gottlieb LP and then I was at Fasken for two years. Before that I did my training contract, which is the articling student equivalent in England, at a law firm called Morrison and Forrester. So spent two years there training as a lawyer and then four years being a lawyer in Toronto, and before that I did my law three at Kings College London and my undergraduate degree at McGill University in Montreal. Amazing. So you've worked at top litigation firms both in Canada and England, and I'd love to know a little more about what were the biggest professional or cultural differences that you've noticed between practicing law industrial jurisdictions? Well, I would say that because I was trained as a solicitor in England, I wasn't able to do the barrister work, which is a different system than we have here in Canada because in England the profession is split, right. So you have the solicitors and the barristers and the barrister are the ones who are able to make or submissions for the court. So that part of my career was missing and after moving back to Canada, I was able to do almost exclusively barrister work and I was very lucky to have appeared in many different courts in both Ontario and part of our Federal Court. System and was there something specific that sparked that change from you? So just start off, I'd love to ask about this specific point you just mentioned on being a solicitor in England and then becoming a litigator in Toronto. But also moving forward, once you become a litigator here and act for all those years, then you notice something with the system or or what really inspired you to start course ready to. Right, So my first switch was from a solicitor to barrister and it was purely based on my observations that in England in a litigation litigation context, the solicitor would do all the prep work. They from evidence gathering to talking with the clients, to developing the legal strategy and to writing some of the legal submissions. But they don't get to argue it. So imagine if you do 20% of the work, but when it comes to the opportunity to make those submissions before a judge, you won't be able to do that. And you know, I don't know the exact reason why that split profession still exists, but I'm sure they have a good reason for it because, you know, England, they've been doing common law for many, many, many centuries. So then I thought, well, if I could do 90% of the work, then it makes sense to just do the last 10% as well. And in Ontario is, as you would know as well, the profession is not split. So if you're in litigation, you get to do both the 90% and the 10%. And I find that it's easy to be able to prepare the case the whole way as we have it here, instead of handing it off almost last second to a barrister who would then make submissions on your behalf. So that's the first transition between solicitor and barrister. Now the bigger one, which is why I decided to leave private practice altogether. And the answer is I can do more for the legal system outside of it than being inside of it. Now, that seems a bit of an odd explanation because you might naturally ask yourself if you're inside of it, you can do more, But if you're outside of it, you're just an observer. And the answer to that is I was a lawyer for for four years. I've worked at 2 amazing firms. And because of that, I see how the process works for a client to try to navigate the legal system, both as a barrister, as a lawyer, and as an advocate before the judge. And you have this insight. And this insight teaches you that our system is not designed to handle as many cases as we have today. So then the answer becomes, well, what are we going to do about it? And the, and the answer I found is to adopt technological tools as part of the litigation process. And I'm not even talking about AI. We don't even need AI to, to, to accomplish this is to make differentpiecesoftheprocessquickersooneexamplethatwebuild@courtready.ca with a very good friend of mine, Adam Marciniak, a great coder as well. He and I thought about, well, right now in, in, in Toronto, as an example, if you want to find court dates, hearing dates for certain types of events like emotion or a before an associate judge, you use a system called Calendly. Now, if you go to calendar right now, you see that the first available date is in 2026 March, February, May, July. And this is the issue you're waiting for more than a year sometimes to have a 75 minute court event before a judge. So there is the issue with the delay. But what we thought about was, well, OK, yes, there are dates very far off in the future, but what if someone cancels? As you know, Claudio, cases tend to settle. What happens when those cases settle? Those dates get brought back into the system for people to be able to book, but you don't know about it unless you're manually checking this website once a week. And this is a personal experience of my right when, when we have the same issue at fast when we're booking a motion date and we were asking some of the articling students or some of the the system to manually check the cores website. And I thought, well, there has to be a better way. So that's an example of we, Adam and I, we built this tool that automatically monitors the system for every dedicated interval. And then as soon as a date comes up, you can sign up for a notification so that you can be notified when the dates you want become available. And this is what we build at courtdates.ca. But that's just one example when tiny example of what we can do outside of the wall to make the justice system easier and more accessible and hopefully reduce some of the delays. Amazing. So just so I understand your product correctly as well, so you you're developing mostly focused on lawyers, mostly focused on helping people the court system declined themselves, who is kind of your main audience? Well, the easy answer to that question is everyone, right? Because even though lawyers could benefit from these tools, more and more people are deciding to take their own cases to court without hiring a lawyer. Now there are many reasons for this, one being that legal services is becoming more and more expensive, unfortunately. So the things that we are building not only focus on helping lawyers, but also help anyone who is using the justice system. Fantastic. That's amazing. And talking about, you know, being an entrepreneur, recently I've had other entrepreneurs in the podcast. It's always been so interesting to hear, you know, the the building process it and so forth, even for, you know, people could go off and become a celebrate practitioner. But I'm wondering if there's any, you know, surprising lesson that you've learned or that you've observed seems to becoming a tech founder. The biggest lesson I've learned thus far is you can do a lot with existing tools. By that I mean, I mentioned this briefly, you don't need AI to do a lot of this stuff, right? Because in legal tech, there tends to be a tendency to focus on the most advanced thing, right? Using AI to do whatever. But my philosophy has, are there things that you can fix without using the most advanced tool out there? Now with the core dates etc. In monitoring system, there's no AI involved. It's as test to technology that solves an immediate issue. Another example is what we've built a part of the court ready.ca is this prejudgment and post judgment interest calculator. So for those of you who are not familiar with that concept, let's say Claudia, you sue me for 1,000,000 bucks today, but you don't get the judgment until a year from now. Between today and the year from now, you are entitled to interest. Now, normally when people calculate that interest, they either use an Excel sheet by looking at the course website or in the in law firms we handed off to to close and other people. Again, there has to be a better way. There is no reason why this process cannot be made quicker by just a calculator. So and that's what we built and and this is another example of we're not using AI to do any of this because we don't need to. There are so many low hanging fruits that can be billed to help and that's where we're going to be focused on. Amazing Oh, moving forward to another topic here within this episode, I'd love to to hear a little more about, you know, personal insights from your experience as well in the field. And I wanted to know you know what have you learned about the legal profession that maybe lost you dance and junior lawyers often done hearing cool and that it takes a few years in practice during you aware of and she really means. Well, the immediate one that comes to mind is how difficult it is and how much of A toll it can take on one's health, both physical and mental. There are many reasons for this, and I can see why this is not really taught in law school because you don't want to encourage people to go into the legal profession without giving them too many warnings as to why they shouldn't or they should think twice before they do it. That said, I do believe that when you were getting into something, you should know as much as possible, we're getting into it. Obviously, it's a rewarding career if you believe in in the justice system and if you believe in, in this idea that you should speak out on behalf of others who may not be able to do so themselves. But the cost, the personal cost on lawyers, and this is not just those in private practice, in house, big or small firms are like, it's immense. As a junior lawyer, your first, second year, third year, you need to start getting used to Casling plans with people and having fewer friends. And when you start to do that, obviously it doesn't make you feel good because you of course have this hypothetical idea that I'll be busy, but not at the cost of those personal relationships. Second, we talk about mental health a lot. And the concrete example I can give you is the legal profession. And again, only as a junior lawyer especially you don't have much control over the work. You're being given assignments as an example, a research task. You do it, you hand it back. Then you don't know if there's going to be another task coming or there will be follow up questions because you might not be copied in the chain of emails that actually gives you better insight of what's going on. Is that is because you don't know what happens next. That causes a lot of people anxiety. Now, is this something that you can probably get used to? Yes, there are ways to deal with it, but things like this are not taught in law school, and they should really be taught because once you're entering this, either the corporate world or in-house, you're dealing with people, you're dealing with expectations. And in a way, none of that has to do with the practice of law or the knowledge of law that you need to have, but is about how to deal with people in difficult situations. Fantastic. Thanks for bringing that very sincere point as well. And if you could change one thing about how legal education is thought globally with your international experience, what would it be and why would you choose to change? It yeah, I wouldn't comment on globally because I've only been educated in two countries so I can speak about perhaps Canada and he also focus more on Canada and England just because I'm more familiar with those system. I think it's to tell people and to teach people what they can do concretely with the legal degree because so much of the law degree is focused on the knowledge of law. But again, I talked about mental health connected to that is what kind of careers can you actually have with with with the practice of law? And that's important because you get into loss where many people have a very sad view of what it is that that they want to do. You know, some people want to become a corporate commercial lawyer, criminal lawyer or human rights, but actually the image in their mind about the day-to-day work of the people they try to emulate once they graduate from law school might be very different in reality. It's about, again, going back to the theme as the theme of making sure people know what they're getting themselves into. If you want to be a criminal lawyer, that you should really, really learn about the day-to-day of that person. And I think that's something law schools can do a better job at. Teaching the student is not just the the knowledge of the law, but the practicalities of being a lawyer. Very, very interesting and that always keeps me engaged and it always gives me so many thoughts about how we approach it and also the different ways that lot education is delivered as well, sometimes by practictioners, sometimes by academics and all that that entails. But going forward here to wrap up today's episode, I'd love to hear a little bit of an advice from YouTube. So if you were to give some kind of advice right now to lost students are graduating in 2025, getting into the market now or if you have foreign pay lawyers who once you really carve out a place for themselves in this field in his career, what would you tell? Them so again a limited Canada as well because as you know I work with quite a bit with the NCA. So the national committee accreditation lawyers were trying to make it to start or continue their legal career in Canada. And so I think the tip there is how, well, well, let me take it back, how much of money, how much money a law firm spends on marketing may not have anything to do with how good they are as a law firm. What I mean by that is you come into the legal market in Canada, you have certain views about which firms are good, which firms are not as good. You may think a firm in a tall building in downtown Toronto is necessarily better than than the one that's further north from downtown. But these perceptions actually often are incorrect. And this is where I think when it comes to research and firms is critical because there are now more and more specialist firms out there and they tend to be smaller. They don't have the large advertising, large advertising budgets, but they're very good at what they do. And I always encourage NCA students to look beyond the 2 kilometer radius from downtown Toronto where any big city for, for that matter. And I will admit, sometimes it's hard to change that perception because perhaps in other places the higher your offices, the better you are. But that's not necessarily the case anymore. Amazing what it what an insightful piece of advice. I really appreciate you taking the time to share this with her listeners and also thank you so much for being in the podcast. Today. Well, thank you so much for having me. And thank you all for tuning into today's episode, and I'll see you on the next one.