Events, Ideas, and Impact with Andrew Bowyer

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 the opportunity to interview Andrew Boyer. He's the founder and CEO of ADB Incites, a company that has organized and and has been organizing incredible events all around the legal and technology sectors. Thank you so much for joining us today, Andrew. Thanks Claudio. Nice to be here. Appreciate the opportunity to speak on your podcast. I appreciate you being here today. And she started off. I'd love for you to introduce yourself to your audience. Yeah. So I'm the founder of ADB Insights, which you have noted is a, I call it a media company and we without news and we focus on you know, convening folks from various different sectors around the ages of innovation. So our main platform and franchise is called the Legal Innovation Forum, which I founded in 2018. And we also are focused on the critical minerals slash mining space and the energy space as well and to some extent of financial services. And what we do is we put on programs through our various different platforms. We put on conferences, we put on round tables, workshops, symposiums, webinars, we produce podcasts as well and we publish articles. And also now we have a creative strategic communications agency focused on the legal tech sector. So lots of different things around, like I said, how these sectors and their ecosystems are changing, how players are innovating and creating a sort of clearing house for a various stakeholders across these different sectors that we're focused on specifically to be able to push the needle. Forward amazing. Well, I saw here when I was prepping for this episode, I, I read a little bit about what you put out there on the Internet and a little bit about your experience and I saw you've worked in London, New York, now in Toronto, and I wanted to ask you a little more about that. You know what have these global experiences taught you about how the legal profession is evolving, and also how it's intersecting more and more, We've innovation. Sure. So my background is I'm, I, I, as you noted, I, I spent 13 years in London and New York, having grown up in Canada and, and in the West Coast, on the West Coast. And I started my career in London with the Financial Times where I ended up being the head of a group called strategic publishing. A quite a young age. Well, we were contending with then was content lead solutions for our advertisers, which in the FT there's obviously major advertisers to do sort of produce thought leadership, high grade content that our audience at the FT would be interested in engaging with. So in effect, working with the editorial and the commercial is very closely at once and I guess technically acting as the publisher of those, you know, various different programs, one of which was focused on the legal sector called Innovative lawyers. And then I was with Bloomberg for seven years and doing a bunch of different things in that company in London and New York and then all over the world by extension. And now I was, you know, not actually to do with the media world. It was more to do with their financial services business, the Bloomberg Terminal and the enterprise business and numerous different things which I will go into top line on what I learned. I think in both those companies, what is mastering the craft of publishing, which is really what our around thought leadership, which is what I really learned at the FT and Bloomberg. I learned a lot about innovation. I worked with a lot of lawyers, but I really saw the heartbeat of how a very, very successful technology innovative company works with a very innovative culture, unique way of doing things that. So I think melding those two together inspired me to start my business and come back to Canada in 2018. So on the legal front, I mean, we look at things like we like I said, we look at things in the sectoral from a sectoral lens. So if you look at the legal sector, it's like any other sector. You have a market that's going on within that sector. You have law firms, you have legal departments and you have third party service providers and what's happened? And the and then you also consumers as well, consumers of legal services like you and me. What you see happening in a sector like legal is technology is disrupting legal, like it has disrupted all the other sectors, but it's disrupting the sort of commercial basis of that sector. And and then you also have other service providers, alternative legal service providers, consulting firms, the big four, and see this complex landscape that's undergoing a lot of change from the old ways of doing things. And what we want to do is cover and frame and crystallize what that change means and give people insights into how they can navigate that as a professional and see the opportunities and also be able to think about and address challenges. If you look at a sector like the critical mineral sector, which is a which is a new area we're looking at, again, sector going undergoing a huge amount of change. A lot of that's driven by external factors. You have our economy, which is based on specific critical minerals that we've built this sort of energy transition around. So you look at electric cars, for example. And So what we're seeing in the headlines now has become a geopolitical question as well, right? It's a front page story on on what what we're experiencing because you have this massive reordering of globalization underway. And so you see this strategic imperative from the United States, for example, and the folks are waking up to the fact that, you know, for sourcing minerals from what the Americans consider strategic competitor in China, they need to look at other sources. So that's where this sort of dynamic comes into play. But the bigger picture there is really, you have a sector that's nascent but fundamental to the future of our economies. It's worked on assumed ways the last 20 years before and the deck chairs are changing. And so all the constituent players in that sector, for example, are industry players, folks building supply chains of downstream. So, you know, OEM's and automakers, for example, or OEM's, automakers and other providers. You have government, you have other stakeholders and you have capital, other stakeholders being for example, in Canada very important Indigenous peoples. You look at Bill C5 coming out, obviously that's creating quite a few headlines in Canada, rightfully so. And so. And then you have professionals, you have lawyers, you have consultants, etcetera. And so all of these and and technology, technology is a key part of part of this as well, especially with the AI revolution, it, it's impacting a lot of things. What we're looking at is, OK, well, all those folks moving around in that the ecosystem need to embrace innovation to change because some things work and some things don't. But there's no substitute for the fact that change is omnipresent everywhere. And so that's again, just sort of providing that framework for people to kind of think beyond and have the toolkits to think beyond where things stand now in the face of change. So that all being said this way that we look at sectors and and guide people, we can look at all kinds of different sectors as well. You look at these ecosystems undergoing change. So those are the ones we've chosen today. Incredible. And if I may ask you, was there any kind of gap in the market that that pushed you into starting and and taking the leap to launch ADB being sites or to you know all these stakeholders together in and making really a dialogue with the legal innovation? Foreign, yeah, I mean I saw an opportunity to to get into the legal space at least and start ADB insights from those with the consulting firm after Bloomberg and it was focused on the innovation as in the legal sector out of London. And yeah, I saw an opportunity and and met some people in Canada and that was kind of what sparked it. And I had a few friends who were in the conference business. So we started as conferences only. And then in the pandemic, we had to innovate. So we did a lot of virtual events, a lot of webinars, which is still a big part of our business model. And so, yeah, I mean, I think the way as an entrepreneur you think about competition is, um, I don't spend a lot of time looking at, I look at how others do it and I think about maybe we could do differently or, or take parts of the way they do things. But the space too is, is I think, you know, you've got to sort of capture this fulcrum of, of, of where folks are really looking to guide themselves through these key, key challenges going on. If you look at legal, for example, because I know you're, you studied law and I think this is a law power podcast. The, the way that we look at a sector like legal is if you're a professional, you're not necessarily a lawyer, you're not necessarily trained about the business of law. You're trained at being an expert on your field and your specific practice within that field, right? That's what people and where I saw the gap was at the time when I started the business was people were very focused on putting on events about their subject matter expertise. And, and I was taking a different view of it being an ecosystem of folks. Law is big business, it's a huge business and it's in fundamental business. And so that's where we saw the, I saw the opportunity of looking at the business of law. And now we say the legal innovation forums about the intersection of business and law and the business of law. And what I mean by that is the other piece that you take it a step further is that law legal tends to think of itself as existing in a bubble. And to some extent it does because the laws are the laws and and the laws of the land and whichever land you're in that that's that's important. But in a business context or even a consumer context. But let's talk about business to business law. So big law, they also are servicing businesses. And what I know from being a business person and these businesses and having work, especially in my Bloomberg days, worked with some brilliant lawyers in house and private practice. And their job is to support the business, help them achieve their goals, but also protect the business. And I think in the current time that we live in now, it's more important than ever because it's a risk on era that we're living in, meaning we have all these sort of multitudes and compounding risks, trade risk, geopolitical risk, tech digital risk, which includes cyber risk of your data and then of course, without saying AI. And then you have, you know, law firms who are service providers to those legal departments who are trying to really help their businesses navigate. And I think now actually, we really live in an interesting time because as I said earlier, the deck chairs are being reordered in the world. All the assumptions we based on on on on globalization, say post 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall, those assumptions are changing and you have these compounding crises, which companies, if you think about large multinational organizations, all these assumptions they base their business models on are fundamentally changing in front of our eyes. And so that creates opportunity, but it also creates a lot of headwinds of risk. So I think the role of lawyers or what their job is to do is to help organizations manage risk and how that reforms itself and reorganizes itself in the face of this change that's going on in the business world where the economic world or society, those are all fundamental things. And I think lawyers are key navigators and the way they think about things to help the businesses navigate is paramount now. So that's one piece that we're helping these, like helping these folks think this is my role and this is my role is going to look like in five years. But the fundamental thing is complexity in the world is not going to change, not in our lifetime. And world's always been complex, but it's especially complex. Now. On top of that, you have this business of law, which is how you practice the law. How do you use technology? All the all the ways you can do things in terms of process, people and technology differently. And we want to sort of meld those too, right? How can you think about just let's let's take your assumptions out of how your role looks now to five years hence, 2030. I think it will look quite different. And so there's two ways to look at it. One is to say, well, gosh, I just finished law school. I'm in deep trouble because you know, these headlines, I see the McKinsey report 45. You know, this is number 2 in terms of disrupted sectors, and there's probably some truth to that. I think there's certainly some truth to that. But it also creates opportunities if you think differently about what your function is and the value of that approach and that way of thinking and helping organizations or people manage all these sort of multitudes of risk is a real fundamental value add to our time. And so that's what I want to harness. It turns our programs over. That's quite, quite. Interesting to hear and you understand a little bit of your perspective when when it comes to that. And if I may ask you specifically about, you know, since you began running the Canadian legal innovation form, were there a few shifts that you've noticed in the legal profession in the approach that lawyers take or in the way that they are interacting with innovation? Yeah, for sure. Oh, we see it like in a couple different ways, right. So first of all, like legal innovation reform, we started in Canada. Now we run our programs in the US and Canada in major centres with lots of legal departments. So places like Toronto, Houston, Atlanta, New York, Chicago. We also ran a series in the Middle East for first series in Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Riyadh in the spring. So we'll be going back to that, that that region. And what I've noticed is that you have these fundamental fulcrums. So interestingly, right, I started my business late 2018. It was December 2018 was my first conference. We had the pandemic, I mean, 1314 months into my business, which I thought I was in deep trouble because I was lucky for conferences and we just started getting off the ground and we've done 6 or 7 conferences. We were very quick to move. All of a sudden we had to innovate. My business model had to change fundamentally. I, I started to say in my mindset, I said, OK, pandemic. All the other conference produces a lot were saying it's going to be 3 months. We can't wait till it goes back. And I said, I'm going to do webinars. I had happened to be doing webinars as a consultant for Bloomberg Law in 2019 through a connection of Bloomberg because I was bootstrapping my business. So I was an editorial consultant, so I knew how to do webinar. So I said, OK, well, I already had that idea, but none of my sponsors would listen to me. 2019 And then they start at the phone started ringing after about a month. And so actually it was a great business because I just took the assumption. I said again, the fundamentals have changed, Let's look in this world for now and let's forget doing anything live and we didn't do anything live for two years, 2 1/2, well, two years and two months and then we came back and it's a hybrid. So I think same with legal, right? The pandemic and any sector, the pandemic was a real accelerator that this excuse of not being able to use technology was no longer applicable. Everybody had to learn how to use, everybody had to, you know, and it's just become part of the furniture. So I think that was a real catalyst out of the and then there was all the stuff of managing through the pandemic and all of the risks and challenges that I think everyone experiences, not just legal profession. I think the second big thing that we saw was a couple of years ago when Chachi PT came out, the ChatGPT 4 came out in November 23. That was another fundamental week forward. So again, it's not like I didn't exist. It's not like people were not using AI and legal, but all of a sudden it became a headline thing. And what's been interesting, you know, for my business is you have these, those are sort of backdrop, fundamental game changers in the sector and marking how that's changing. So if you look at the stories about AI a couple of years ago that we were producing was like, what does the world look like with AI River's navel gazing. Now it's well, AI's integrated in the practice and this is what's working and this is what's not. And now is how do you prompt or how do you train your associates to have the same level of knowledge as you do? You know, one thing you hear about AI is folks say, you know, partners in law firm are better users than AI, which is kind of contradictory because you think and and, and and new graduates are more fearful of AI. And you kind of think that's contradictory because you think, OK, folks in their late 20s, early 30s adopting, you know, starting in their careers, very tech savvy, digital, you know, born, born with a, you know, completely digital life. And, and, and so it's just sort of second nature versus a 50 year old partner who's like, yeah, yeah, I was 20 when the Internet came around or 25. And so but it's prompting, it's the questions to not ask to know the outputs being not correct and going back on that. And I think there's also a fundamental fear. I would imagine younger lawyers with lots of debt saying I, I might, I don't know what my career is going to look like. I, I don't know. And I think the general consensus is that, well, look much different than perhaps when you, what you thought it would look like and when you begin with. But there's lots of opportunities. If you take those skills and use that to your advantage, I think some people will become very, very successful with that. But it's not necessarily an easy mindset to adopt. And it's easy to say it's an entrepreneur like myself. That's all well and good, but I'm an entrepreneur. I'm, I'm used to changing things. I'm used to change. I'm used to opportunities and I have experience that now. Understood. And taking a specific look at that, when you see, you know, law firms and in-house teams working in the different plethora of issues that they have to deal with and then having, you know, to content deliver to all of these different stakeholders in groups. Do you think there is sure few things that these groups or law firms show might be getting wrong when they talk about innovation? They think there's anything in particular that you could pinpoint? There's assumptions from people that things will change fundamentally very quickly. And then there's assumptions and then there's it's hard to assume what that may look like. So, you know, assumptions are are hard. That can be a bit more rude about what people say about assumptions. But I think that the best, you know, the mistakes that are made is, and it's hard, I think for people who are trained as lawyers, right? Because your job is to say this, this and this might happen. So therefore you have to be aware of that in case, because this might happen. And, and people who are not lawyers like me say, well, that might happen, but I don't care. I'm going to keep going and, and, and see what happens. And and that and that mindset, I think is more difficult for lawyers because they're used to saying, yeah, but so I think that's a real challenge for folks to say, well, one part I need to embrace the possibility of change in my profession. And yet in my professional life, I have to navigate and help people really define how they manage risk. So I think I think that's a part, I think in, in terms of innovation, just depends on who you're talking to. Some folks will say, don't need to care, but I'm going to retire in five years. I would say to them, you should care because you need to sell your stake. If you're in a partner fermions, you need someone to buy that steak. The firm needs to maintain or grow its value. Or if you're an owner of a firm, a small firm like you and here, for example, in personal injury firm. So what's the value of the thing you're selling to people if AI can do everything? And finally, talent. If you're a senior leader and you're not attracting the right talent because you don't care about technology, Claudia, you graduated recently. You would know this for a fact that you want to work in that cool and innovative place because you wanna you wanna future ahead of yourself. So I think that's a mistake is to to to bury your head in the sand that things aren't changing. Well, on the other hand, not be too much of A Pollyanna and saying it's going to change, yeah, we're the world's fault. Like the sky is falling. It falls in between. What I observe is people make do and they adjust and they innovate. Incredible. So specifically talking about now the IBA events coming up in Toronto International Bar Association, you've, you've chosen to talk about some of the some very specific topics on critical minerals legal operations. So those those events that will run alongside with the, the main IB events. And I wanted to ask you a little bit about, you know, I know that your company focused on this team themes, but what kinds of conversations are you hoping they're going to spark while all of these lawyers will be here in Toronto? So we we're not aligned with the idea officially we're doing, we're hosting these off IBA events because as we're you know a lot of lawyers are based in Toronto like you lawyers coming into town. So we're working with a few partners on that. We have 10 launch it officially, but it's being finalized. And we think that those topics fit into our warehouse nicely because in the substantive areas the things were interested in our financial services, critical minerals and trade by definition plus legal innovations. So we've got three different roundtables planned. Those would be sort of 12 to 2:00 PM's and invite and then have a sort of rich conversation with various perspectives from around the world again about this intersection of business and law. So it won't be substantive in the sense and it will be more how does this fit into the bigger picture. And as part of those round tables not invite non lawyers as well folks who are you know, in the business world in in in finance, consulting industry, etcetera to make that really like that's what what we want to get out of these is it's an ecosystem approach. Outstanding as we, as we've been talking through this conversation today and we've, we've definitely touched on and off on AI and, and how I know is, is very much the, the topic of just about everything you read these days, right? Every every third article, every 3rd YouTube video. But I think that many of these conversations are very much needed. You have. So I'm wondering from your work and what you've been doing along with lawyers, what do you think that or how much do you think it's real change coming to everybody's way? And then how much do you think it's actually just noise that the firms and as you said, talent will have to cut through? So they're not, you know, kind of just seduced by the shiny new AI that this firm is using. But maybe that that is not going to translate into the results they expect for their careers on the loyal side and then maybe for the results on the on the client side. I think I can have a huge impact on the structure of the sector. How that impact plays out, I think it will take time. I think it's having an impact to some extent, but it's, it hasn't been sort of seen yet. So the first thing to think about, right, is the client side first, the buyers of these services, what are they looking for? Well, first of all, if you're in a big corporate, not just you are talking about adopting AI, the rest of your company, the rest of your sector, say your financial services, I mean, very tech forward, AI has been integrated. That would be an accelerator. So your legal department is part of those businesses. That type of business is going to be going alongside that and looking for more efficient and effective ways because they don't sit in a vacuum. They sit in a bubble. They are integrated into those businesses and those businesses need to accelerate and address these risks that are completely coming at them all the time. And they are using legal as the backbone. So there that legal needs will be and is getting pulled along into that bigger AI story, right, Not just about the legal sector for the law firms themselves, You know, it doesn't take much to realize that you're going to be able, you're not going to be able to bill as many hours in the same way you did because a, I can do a lot of that associate work. You can do a lot of the research, you can do a lot of the production. And so where do you fit in there? Now, I would argue law firms and lawyers can add a lot of value with their expertise. It's just how they charge for that value will be perhaps in a different way. But whether those rate, you know, that the hourly billing model, I think will come into real question. And I think it is. So you'll see that sort of fundamental reordering of how firms work and maybe they don't need as many people, which obviously creates down downstream problem for new graduates, etcetera. But I don't do think how they are they crystallize that value through risk management for their clients and advising on that and supporting that creates opportunity, but it will take a fundamental shift and I'm not sure how it's going to look. So I think that's that's that's kind of how I see the I started playing. And I think another thing to think about for law firms, right, we're doing a symposium on the law firm of 2030 in September in Toronto. And one of the things is this notion of owning your IP of your firm. If that's built on AI models in five years, then who owns that, which is a big AI company on that IP? I mean, then there's always this fear that, hey, what business are we in, right? And so this move towards concepts of like that, the private cloud for to run your AI on our private LM's, you see this movement towards that because you don't necessarily want to give that IP away. You don't know what your structure your firm's going to look like, but it's going to look differently. So, yeah, so that's kind of like a long answer to your question, which is absolutely, I think those are the fundamental changes that are going to be happening. Anything else on law firms, is it legal departments are busy because we're working with the businesses they're in. And So what you see is law firms, innovation groups are expanding quite quickly the big law firms and they're able to advise and integrate a white label technology to serve their clients needs. Law firm is a sort of tech stack concept for their clients. Is also providing a tech deck is also pretty interesting. Amazing. So Andrew, I really appreciate all the insights you've brought so far and talking about specifically you're you're very specific role that you've been playing with your business. It brought me to think about two specific themes. Also talking about conferences and events that I believe that that lawyers would go and attend events for for few different reasons. One of them, of course, will be the training and the opportunity should be, you know, receiving information that is just, you know, new and very hot topic, so to say. But I also believe that there is another aspect of it on, on networking and business development. And I'm sure that some of the value of of having these conferences that you put together is that. So I was wondering what what things have you noticed that lawyers can do? I asked that specifically because the audience for this podcast is really those early career professionals, people getting out of loss right now. What kind of value can they provide? And also, what do you think that that they can do to, you know, have meaningful connections through these events and maybe not just during the event leading to long run? So I think the thing the first, so we think about, I think also the reason one of our successful, our events are successful have their business is successful so far is trying to think about the end user and what they want. So the first step is what do we want from the content, right. And I've kind of talked a lot about our editorial take on things. So really our events are not really about technology. Our sponsors are technology companies, but we're producing content that folks are interested who are practitioners about this intersection of business and law and the business of law are interested in engaging with, right? And the adjunct stuff And the punch line is that you need tech to support you to help manage all of these elements of the story, which is always changing. So I think the content, getting your head around that concept of having a broader perspective of that where you fit in, in your function into what organizations need, which again goes back to that risk. So if I say a mindset is this is my skill set, this is what the world needs other skill set like that, how do I a I can do a lot of this stuff that I used to get paid or thought I was going to get paid to do, which is kind of boring anyways. So how can I make sure that that skill sets moving towards that, that fulcrum where the question of the value I'm adding might be defined in a different way or might be monetized in a different way. So that's like one piece of advice is to and to see it as exciting. So with my events, it's like look at the ecosystem, look at the opportunities. You know, the old way was to work in a law firm and you make partner and if you wanted more quiet life, you go hit theory, go work in house. Well, that's not the case anymore. It's a busy life anyway, either way. But there's lots of other opportunities. You can go work in a legal that company, you can work in an LSP, you can start your own kind of law firm. So I think don't be scared of the opportunities that you that may be in front of you and don't be scared of the fact that, OK, it may not look the same way as he thought it would. You can still, if you have that mindset, there's lots of opportunities that will come from this sort of significant error change. That's easier said than done, but I think that helps. So the networking, again, our events, specifically minded people, people have taken different career paths. People are thinking about things differently. And then of course, you know, with with us, it's we, we host sort of regular events all over the place that we have like DIN groups and obviously LinkedIn is a very powerful tool. We do a lot of virtual programming. So I think just keep up and also keep up with thinkers in the sector as well. Amazing. Well, I think that with that, that piece of advice to early career professionals, we, we segue into a really good ending to the podcast here today. If I may ask a, a final piece of advice then to, you know, law students, career professionals, or, you know, considering whether they should be, you know, attending these events, whether they should be there, even though they might feel like they don't have much to contribute because they are just kind of learning the trade and, and learning the professional. Now, what's your what's your final take on? That so the opportunity, especially in this sector like legal is everything's changing. So this whole notion of the apprenticeship model that they called is changing and nobody knows the answer where it's going. And I think they could say that for lots of different sectors, but we're talking about legal. So I could, I would say that you have an equal place at the table as a, you know, newly graduated young lawyer, lawyer to be that can help push the sector forward and bring creative ways of thinking about how it changes and what can change. I think that sort of it's become a much more flat structure in a sense of lots of good ideas, lots of good ideas and opportunities are out there. And I think experience counts, but I don't think not having experience really puts you at a limit. But if you don't jump into that pool, then I think you're really taking making the wrong decision. You've got to just go with it and see, you know, see, see where it takes you. So your your place at that table is just as equal and there's and I think that's exciting. Absolutely with this this honestly piece of encouragement we we get to the end of our today's episode. So I just wanted to thank you again for taking the time to be in the podcast today. Wanted to thank everybody who's tuning in and looking forward to seeing you all on the next episode. Thanks, Claudio. Thanks. Appreciate it.