LinkedIn Insights and Opportunities Beyond Law with Jake Hirsch-Allen

Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of Studying Law Around the World. Today we have a very special guest who, guest who brings a lot of a unique blend of legal expertise and tech industry experience. Having worked at LinkedIn, he has valuable insights on how lawyers can leverage this platform to advance their careers. It's my pleasure to welcome in today's podcast Jake Hirsch Allen to the show. Jake will be speaking to us in his personal capacity, and thank you for joining us today. My pleasure. And not only will I be speaking in my personal capacity, but I know a lot of our conversation is gonna feature LinkedIn, and I actually left LinkedIn a couple weeks ago, so I can now speak in every capacity that I, that I'm operating in. Alrighty, perfect. And so to go ahead and kick things off here, could you tell us a little bit about your career journey? How did you transition from the legal field to working in big tech on LinkedIn? And what has been, you know, some of the key highlights along the way on your journey? Happy to. Happy to. For me, it's a less confusing journey, I guess, from the inside, so to speak, than from the outside. That's probably true of most people. But I very much went to law school not intending to be a lawyer, but rather to get the broad education. that McGill's, what they then called Trans-Systemic Program, a bachelor in civil law as well as in common law, so 2 separate degrees offered. And when I left, I actually fell into law largely because I think the particular Canadian law schools do such a great job of sort of automating that project, that process of recruitment, right? First you summer, then you article, and then you become a lawyer at a firm. And yet the drop-off rate, of course, from firms is pretty significant, right? I think they say most people within 10 years, or over half of lawyers within 10 years, are no longer with the firm that they started out with. And I don't blame the firms for that. I think the system was designed in a way that really cultivates large quantities of talent early in their early days to work for big firms, even small firms. And then gradually folks branch out, not just out of those firms into general counsel roles, et cetera, but like me, if you didn't necessarily intend on being a lawyer to begin with, it doesn't take long for many of us to drift back to that original goal of sort of working with that legal background, but in other areas. And I got quite lucky. My first law jobs were in public international law and international criminal law, sort of following my father, who was in a diplomat's footsteps in The Hague, working on the Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, in Cambodia, working for a tribunal focused on Pol Pot's regime, and then even at the Supreme Court of Israel, where I spent much of my time focused on not the current prime minister, although he was being prosecuted at the time by the Supreme Court, but rather a lot of the balancing that I'm actually continuing to undergo in terms of looking at privacy versus economic goals, looking at technological advancement versus environmental goals, balancing some of these rights that I think is sort of law is all about, but in ways that, as I said, later in my career, I wasn't necessarily balancing as a lawyer. Rather, for instance, much of the past 5 years, one of the ways that I achieved my goal of building public-private partnerships for LinkedIn, which we'll get into in more depth, was by managing Microsoft's lobbyists, what they call their consultants in the US, on behalf of our sales organization. And as you can imagine, Microsoft has a lobbyist in almost every town and village in America. And so that allowed for incredible access, but also took advantage of my law school knowledge in terms of both how the US administration works, how laws are drafted. Most of what we were doing was not lobbying around policymaking, but rather procurement, right? The government buying services from LinkedIn, et cetera. And yet I think there was a very significant overlap in terms of the knowledge that I gleaned again from law and even that I started practicing, 'cause my first Canadian law job was with a little firm called Gilberts that I'm still in touch with. I think one of the most innovative firms in the country, an IP litigation firm that also does a variety of corporate work as well. And in working with them, that's when I actually first learned to lobby. So Tim Gilbert, the founder there, and I had meetings on Capitol Hill and Parliament Hill in both Washington, DC and Ottawa. And a lot of the work even that I'm now doing post-LinkedIn involves helping a variety of organizations from a nonprofit called Digital Moment to a think tank called the Deus with their government advocacy and relationships. Wow, that's incredible. I love all the aspects of diplomacy, lobbying, and all of that. Really, really impressive. Thank you. Yeah, it does. It really does, huh? Well, before we go too far and kind of coming back into the LinkedIn experience, if we may, dive into that a little bit and maybe to share quickly with our listeners. I learned about Jake's great work in one of the webinars and workshops he has done in the past, helping students and lawyers about showcasing their experience on LinkedIn and all of that using the platform. So if we may, like, deep really go really quickly into that, what would you say that law students specifically could do on the platform to showcase, you know, their work, start their professional brand on LinkedIn? Are there specific things that you'd recommend to do or not recommend to do? It's a great question. So it's actually many questions. Why don't I start with a bit of an explanation of how I ended up at LinkedIn, and then I'll get into how I recommend folks use it. That'd be great. So for me, the transition to LinkedIn was in some ways really obvious. People joked for many years that I was Jake Dinn, that I was sort of born to network. And in part, I think, as I mentioned earlier, that's because I was a diplo brat. My father was our ambassador to Spain in the Vatican to Israel, and then a junior diplomat in a number of other countries. And it was really in those more junior capacities that I was at his feet shaking hands with as many folks, you know, in the room around a dinner party as possible, learning that skill of putting aside self-doubt, putting aside the imposter complex, and just sort of going at it, shaking somebody's hand, expressing your interest in what they do and their ideas and who they are, listening really well. and asking good questions and then adding value. And I'll get into each of those things because I think they are sort of at the core of my tips for networking later. But all that to say, when I left LinkedIn, I had a couple friends who were coming— sorry, when I left— I just left LinkedIn. When I left intellectual property law, I had a couple friends who I had regularly sent clients to as an IP lawyer. So when somebody came and asked for how to design an app or how to build a website, I would pass them on to a few firms that I respected a lot that were agencies doing software development or building apps. And one of them actually founded by a couple friends of mine from Ultimate Frisbee came back and said, hey, why don't you help us start this company? We know that you're no longer working as a lawyer and you've been sending us client after client. Can you just do more BD for us? And so I did that and we actually hired so many clients so quickly that we couldn't hire enough software developers. So we, you know, we flipped from being very good at dev, but to being very good at BD, and then we just didn't have enough developers. And this was at a time when a lot of folks had the same problem. Andreessen Horowitz, the famous venture capital firm, was describing how software was eating the world, and literally the most in-demand job at that point were software developers. So we were teaching at a school in Toronto that had just been created, a software bootcamp called Bitmaker, and we were a little frustrated with the education there. One of my co-founders wanted to move to Vancouver, And so he moved out west and we created Lighthouse Labs, which for a long time was Canada's largest software development bootcamp. I think still trains more people in tech than almost any school in Canada. And Lighthouse took off. The bootcamp grew really fast. My co-founders and I, in a very classic startup fashion, got into a fight. And while I remain really good friends with them, thankfully our friendships are sort of more important. And I would always say friendships are more important than professional relationships, but I instead joined LinkedIn. People again had been joking that I was Jaked in for a long time. I was beginning to learn sort of sales and partnerships in BD, and there was a bunch of roles open in sales at LinkedIn in Canada, and a friend referred me in. And the last 10 years up until 2 weeks ago was spent within this, you know, professional network, this social network that does in some ways resemble, or at least my activities resemble, what LinkedIn was designed around, this sort of concept of networking for professional purposes in a professional manner. So happy to get into sort of way more depth on the tips around LinkedIn and on that transition. But I thought it important to sort of explain how I went from law to big tech. And of course, while I was at LinkedIn, Microsoft bought us, which resulted in a fair bit of change. We bought a company called Lynda.com, which turned into LinkedIn Learning. And so I spent a lot of my time with LinkedIn actually focused on higher ed in Canada and LinkedIn Learning. And then public-private partnerships across North America with a focus on workforce development on behalf of LinkedIn's hiring solutions. Alrighty. Wow, that's quite incredible. I love how you navigated it. And when you say it, it really was— it really feels very seamless, you know, from one experience to the next one. That's incredible. Well, and then if we may then go into the tips and dos and don'ts, maybe that especially law students could do to, you know, use the best out of the platform. And I guess it has a lot to do with real networking, right? The same principles that would apply to in-person interaction and all of that. But love to hear more from you about that. You got it. You nailed it. I think that is the key tip, which is the parallels between in-person networking and online networking and the differences, I think, offer an opportunity for all of those folks who are perhaps too introverted or shy or just not comfortable with some of the in-person networking. Well, they can move some of that activity onto LinkedIn and it does serve the same purpose often at an even greater scale and speed, albeit with the sort of close relationships that I find really help move the needle in terms of getting a job or making a sale or building a partnership or fundraising. Those relationships I do find are accelerated by in-person interaction. And so I think the end goal for a lot of your work on LinkedIn should be, if you really do want to build a relationship, to eventually move it off of LinkedIn LinkedIn to SMS and email to text message and eventually in person. So some quick tips for lawyers on how they should use LinkedIn. In part, it's no different than any other professional using LinkedIn, i.e., it's both a place where they can present who they are in the form of their profile, and that can be quite complete and quite varied. So everything from hobbies to volunteer work, from sports to, of course, your day job. And within your day job, it can involve many different projects and committees and, again, volunteer opportunities, mixed media, social media posts, et cetera. So the idea really is to use LinkedIn to broadcast your whole self. That's one piece. And then, as you said, to network, not just for new clients, but also for potential partners to understand what is going on in the world of law and outside of it, you know, in sort of, for instance, a particular industry that you're focusing on. And I I find because lawyers don't tend to use LinkedIn as much as other professionals, there's both an opportunity for those lawyers who do use it to really stand out and shine. You know, in tech, everybody and their sister is constantly posting on LinkedIn. In law, much more rare. And the result is that you have that opportunity, but also there are less role models, right? There's less folks that you can look at to see, how should I be a lawyer on LinkedIn? And here, I think the opportunity is twofold. You can actually not just shine out, but also not just shine or stand out, but also contact more clients more easily because you don't have a lot of lawyers doing that. So again, if one looked at tech sales or if one looked at finance sales, I am regular— or education sales, I'm regularly bombarded by people sending me InMails, messages on LinkedIn, trying to sell me some financial product or financial management service, et cetera. I've never ever gotten a lawyer reach out to offer their legal services. And so I think that that again presents a huge opportunity for lawyers to do so. In terms of tips, I would maintain as much as sort of a professional profile as possible. I find, you know, the joke is if you're holding up a fish and you're not a fisherman, then it's hurting your profile, not helping it, at least on LinkedIn. So, you know, If it's on Meta or Facebook or wherever else, then that's so be it. But on our platform, the goal really is to demonstrate your professional self and to have everything from the image of yourself to your background image, from the text on your profile, et cetera, related to that image of how you want to be presenting yourself professionally, of how you want others to perceive you professionally. So with the emphasis there on at-work professional. Another sort of quick tip, because I've mentioned it a few times already, is around media. Our eyes tend to be drawn to anything that is image, video, motion, not to text. And as a result, you know, we've seen via eye scanners, when you're on your LinkedIn profile, if you want somebody to focus on a particular project, on a particular job, let's say you've got another job that you're working on right now, but it was actually your last job that you were most proud of. Add video content, add a link to the website of the law firm and it'll automatically pull in the webpage. Add any content that'll keep the person's eye and that really will attract them. And then the last thing I'll say is the key in every interaction in life that you want to grow, whether you— from whether it's professionally or personally, is to add value to the other person, to make sure that they leave that interaction grateful to have spent the time with you. And that isn't easy to do, but you can actually do it both on LinkedIn by, for instance, posting content that is actually helpful for other industries, other lawyers, whoever. And you can do it in person because a lot of, as I said, the work on LinkedIn is meant to eventually get that in-person meeting. You send an email trying to— first you connect and you always customize the connection request. So a key tip here is anytime you ever send a request on LinkedIn to connect with somebody, make sure that you're actually customizing the messaging. And then once you've connected, the goal, as I said, is to eventually build to that in-person meeting. So you could be, for instance, sending them an article on something that you could eventually talk about in person or requesting feedback on something that you think they would be interested in so that eventually you get from that feedback into the point where they're saying, oh yeah, let's grab a coffee or let's hop on a Zoom. At which point, again, your goal is add value, make sure that they're benefiting from that meeting. And here I'll provide a tip that isn't unique to LinkedIn, but I think is one of my top networking networking tips more generally. When you get an in-person meeting, so each of these interactions on LinkedIn is meant to eventually generate a coffee chat. And when I say in person, it could be on Zoom as well, or even just a phone call. Mm-hmm. In that meeting, again, you're adding value and your goal is to find 1 to 3 more people for you to meet in the future. Because generally speaking, you don't want to set up a call to get a job or to sell into a client or to find a new client. Rather, You just want to build the relationship and the relationship is built on a mutual value exchange. And once there is trust and the belief that there is value going back and forth, that's when you can take it and sell into them or try to get a job with them or try to fundraise from them or as a lawyer, try to pick them up as a client. It's really first to build that relationship and the trick I have for how to leave one of those coffee chats with An easy follow-up is you draft an email to the person you had that chat with and you say, look, it was amazing talking to you about these things. Here are links to the articles that I was talking about, et cetera. Here's the people you mentioned that you think I should talk to. If you're open to it, I would love to meet them. Be very grateful for an introduction from you. And then you write the introduction for them in that same email. You say, here's the draft from me to X person. Here's the draft, sorry, from you to Y person. Feel free to copy and paste and hit send. If not, no problem. Is there anything else that you think I should know about this subject? And if not, again, no problem. Thank you so much for the time. And that way it's a super soft, low-pressure interaction where they get value from the links, et cetera, where they're reminded of what you need, the introductions, and where if they have the time, it's super easy for them to make those introductions. Wow. Fantastic. Wow. I think that was really a good formula that anybody could use, and I really appreciate you for sharing it, the, the, your big professional secret right there. My pleasure, my pleasure. Already, wow, that, that's quite incredible. And, you know, from the— I, I guess it's been over 6 months now that I'm going over the recently hired attorneys in, in Toronto, and what I see more often than not is just mostly people just have the name of the experience and the name of the law firm, and that's about it, right? Not too much. Yeah, very blank. And I was even thinking, uh, I know that for other, other kinds of jobs where people are actually recruited from LinkedIn, uh, you'd have more details, you'd have keywords and all those things for to work the, the SEO on your advantage and all of that. But, uh, it seems like because of the, the how streamlined the hiring process is for law, then kind of LinkedIn is just an add-on, but not necessarily the go-to platform where recruiters will find your resume or anything like that. So that was just something that I noticed, I guess, from— I think you're right. And I think it's a professional mistake. I mean, I think I have left LinkedIn because I no longer agree that it should be the single and sole repository of labor market information, their data on skills and jobs, et cetera. And we can get into my sort of values adjustment or transition over time, which led to my departure. But let's put that aside for a second and talk about reality instead of the world that we want it to be. The reality right now is LinkedIn is the place that the vast majority of professional networking happens in certainly North America and really most of the world and in most industries. Like if you're a doctor, it's slightly different. There are some professions where, because of the degree of regulation, if you're a tradesperson, it's very unusual for you to exclusively get business via LinkedIn. But for lawyers, it's the perfect profession to do that. All of their clients are constantly using LinkedIn. And as I said, shockingly few lawyers do. To your point, a huge percentage of lawyers don't even create a background image, let alone a full profile. And so I think there is this huge opportunity for lawyers to dig much deeper. And the key is to have them do so in an authentic manner. So they have to be true to who they are, not who the firm is, not who they sort of want to come across as, but rather to the extent that it is a human coming across as a human, particularly in the age of GenAI when so much of our content is being automated, I think is really, really valuable. And law, because so much of the value that a lawyer is adding tends to be their mind, their ideas, their strategy, even revealed in the form of their words, I think there is a much, much bigger opportunity than most lawyers actually have adopted to use LinkedIn as a platform where they can express their views on a wide variety of topics that will then lead to business for them in those areas. I'll use the examples that I'm working on right now. I spend a lot of time on AI right now and on everything from the privacy to the safety consequences on the public, international, and global regulatory aspects of it to how the federal government is currently funding compute capacity. And in each of those respects, there is a completely different set of lawyers whose practices relate, right? privacy lawyers, IP lawyers, transaction lawyers, corporate commercial lawyers, litigators, lobbyists, et cetera. And yet I see very, very few of them engaging on these topics online. I see far more folks in tech. I see the investors, I see the regulators, I see, but the actual lawyers working at firms, super, super rare. And so again, to your point, I think there's this huge chance to fill that vacuum, that sort of empty space on LinkedIn with content from professional lawyers. Already, that's, that's quite incredible. Um, if we may kind of move on to another subject, um, you mentioned, you mentioned that you went to law school at first not necessarily to become a lawyer and all of that, and those transitions happened quite, uh, in an easy manner, right? Mm-hmm. But, um, I've been— I've, I've, I was very impressed by how many career transitions and all these things which you explained that happened quite naturally, it seemed like. Uh, and if I may ask you, how, how did Or maybe, wow, what would you recommend to people who are considering transitioning out of law or transitioning to a non-legal role per se that still involves a lot of legal matters, but it's not necessarily like a lawyer role? Is there anything that you found helpful to yourself or that you've seen in other people's lives? Yeah, definitely. It's a good question because it's been a little while since I thought about it. I left law 10 years ago or so. I stopped paying my dues, let's say, 8 or 9 years ago. And so I've been thinking from the perspective of a non-lawyer for long enough that I have to switch back. And I think if I remember correctly, that like many professions, but perhaps even more than most, because again, it is a highly regulated profession and because it sort of has its own language and has protected itself to an extent that few other professions have, Law seems to be isolated, and lawyers seem to think of themselves as separate from the economy in a manner that is not just not true, but is actually hurting their practice. The lawyers who were able to think about business strategy and legal strategy, to think about policy and its implications both socially and financially, to look at numbers as if they were in finance making investments, but then also to look at those numbers as if they were a litigator and what the potential risks associated with a deal might be, etc. It is that ability to go back and forth between law and the rest of business or the rest of society that I think makes for the best lawyers. It makes for the most successful lawyers, both in law and those who leave law to move on to policy, to becoming a staffer for a government minister or a civil servant, to becoming— a general counsel at a firm or somebody working in compliance. There is an infinite number of roles that you can leave law to explore and to take on. And the challenge is I find folks in law don't realize that. Like, I was just trying to counsel a friend at a top firm in the States who was leaving to find a different job and considering working at firms and then elsewhere in the private sector. And I think his biggest challenge was to think of the possibility of working in an area that didn't have the word law or legal, didn't have policy or compliance associated with it because you could work anywhere. I mean, I ended up in, you know, a sales job, a BD job, a startup job. By the time I left LinkedIn, as I said a few weeks ago, I had 11 side agreements wherein our head of compliance, LinkedIn's sort of top lawyer from a compliance perspective, who interestingly went to McGill and then moved down to the States. He had signed off on each of these 11 side agreements wherein I could be on 2 or 3 boards. I was advising a bunch of startups. I've advised foundations, et cetera. And in each case, I was getting outside of sort of my core job as a salesperson, But you could imagine if I was a lawyer, I could have the same thing. Each of these, as long as I avoid conflicts of interest, which is necessary, not— and lawyers tend to have this sort of a bit of a holier-than-thou, isn't a common expression, right? This idea that we have to ethically be better than the rest. And I think if that were true, it would be great. Rather, I don't think lawyers are particularly ethical. I think we should be. I think we should aspire to know ethics. and the law to know responsibility and obligation better than anyone else, but then to put that into practice we actually have to not think of ourselves as better but rather at the same level as all of those others that we're helping, and in doing so to work with them as mentors and as guides who have this like specialized expertise, the law, but which can then allow us to navigate other communities and add value to other communities where we are the observers and the learners, right? Where it took me 5 years to become as expert in pedagogy and education as it did law. It took 4 years of law school for me to become a quote unquote lawyer. And yet very few folks in sort of education or pedagogy require the imprimatur, the certificate, the degree, the officialness that law has protected itself with. And unfortunately, I think the flip side of those protections is that lawyers don't identify outside of law with other communities in a way that prevents them from breaking into, selling into, doing business with, coming up with strategies for those communities. And if instead lawyers can be as creative with their business strategy as they are their legal strategy, I think they'll actually be much more successful. Wow, fantastic, fantastic. Well, moving on to our last question for today's podcast, uh, you mentioned you've been working very much with AI, and there's quite a few interactions you've done from, you know, policymaking perspective, prosecution perspective, etc. Are there some things that you could share with us about how tools like gen AI and, and et cetera could reshape the, the future of what legal practice looks like today? Yeah. So that's a good question. How, how, how does legal practice look different now, I guess, than it did before? Is that another way of framing what you— the way you just put it? Yep. Yeah. And, and are there some things that you could see happening in from now onwards, you know? Yeah, 'cause it is funny. I mean, I'm spending a ton of my time on AI and GenAI is the only thing that everybody's talking about right now in AI. Mm-hmm. But the ways that AI has benefited law actually precede GenAI. And I don't think it's gonna be as crazy a change for law as it will be in other areas because of all of the many famous stories now about lawyers and leveraging case law that actually is full of hallucinations, et cetera. That's the law side. I think the more interesting part is where AI came from in terms of its work with law and even basic technologies as they've automated it. So for instance, like the word processor dramatically changed law, right? All of a sudden people could like edit the documents faster, et cetera. Think of the same change as statistically we began to be able to review how judges across America had decided how they'd awarded judgments, damages, and therefore what you should argue in front of almost every judge in America. Now there is software that will tell you, this is how you should argue for this judge versus this is, you know, what you should claim in damages for this judge, because statistically that's what's most likely to happen based on all of their past judgments, all the other judgments in that district, et cetera, et cetera. That kind of statistical analysis is massively valuable, and it's just beginning to, beginning to be used by the vast majority of lawyers, but it's been around for like 10, 20 years. So it's some of this older tech that I think lawyers need to grasp, in addition, of course, to more recent tech where we're using natural language processing and semantic analysis to scan thousands of documents, right? It's less important in Canada than the US, but in the US where you have massive discovery This is huge, multi-hundred thousand document reviews, and where tech can go through those documents way faster, where AI, older AI, can go through those documents way faster than we can. So I think those are some ways. I also think if lawyers are able to, for instance, use LinkedIn and marketing and other means of sort of business development, much in the way that other businesses have for for far longer, but which lawyers felt either for reasons of propriety or they were worried about the referral process, etc., wasn't appropriate, that I think that will also allow them to leapfrog. Those law firms, for instance, which in part adopted the corporate structure so that they could be a little bit more dynamic and flexible and maybe even efficient as businesses rather than the classic legal partnership structure, those corporations I think have done what I just described, adopted marketing tech and other aspects of tech much faster on average than the partnerships. And partly our profession needs that dynamism, that ability to adapt and adopt technology. Oh, those are great points you brought up. I feel like I'm leaving this podcast today knowing, you know, a lot of basics of networking that maybe nobody has ever told me before and incredible strategies, you know, to connect with people all the way to maybe good ideas to practice when you're doing business. So I really appreciate your time and your generosity with us today. Thank you everybody for tuning in and listening to this episode as well, and we'll see you all in the next episode. Thank you,