Innovation, Relationships, and Growth with Gary Kalaci

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 Gary Kaladze. He is a lawyer by trade. He's been in a translation business for over 2 decades, and he's the CEO of Alexa Translations. Gary has a very interesting story of his life, of his interests in entrepreneurship, in anthropology, leadership and so forth, and I'm very excited to interview him today. Thank you so much for joining us in the podcast today, Gary. Thank you for having McCloud. You're excited to be here. Amazing and you start over interview. I'd love for you to introduce yourself to your audience. So as a quick introduction, I grew up in Albania, moved to Canada sort of during my last year of high school and then did my education in Canada initially in the science is about chemistry, went from there to a law and MBA program. At the same time during my university career, I was a court interpreter. And that's how I got started getting some exposure to translation and what brought me to my, my, what I do for a living today and my sort of current enterprise. The, it was an interesting exposure. And then as I decided to pursue the loan MBA program, it was a bit of a shift from what I initially started university with where I thought I wanted to do medicine. And then from there sort of said, I think I enjoyed this law because of this law field with the exposure that I had from the courts. And at the same time I started doing this side business in translation, I was like, well, I also could use some business training because I don't have any. And that's where the law and MBA program thought process came from and that's how we got here today. Briefly after being called to the bar, I made the decision that I was actually going to focus on business and and pursue the translation business. Since I have always been committed to community giving and being involved in a variety of organizations in the not-for-profit space from a civilian university unsupported governors to to United Way and all the way to currently being on the the chair of the board of Junior Achievement Canada and also on the Board of Junior Achievement Americas, amongst amongst a few other organizations. I'm involved with it. It's really pursuing certain causes that are are close to my heart as well as that I think are really good for our communities. Amazing. Well, I'm, I'm glad that you already give us a little information on the JD MBA and how that business training has helped you in pursuing the path that you are in today. But I'd love to hear a little bit more about your company as well. So I've seen that it's definitely up to date and and definitely keeps up with the trends. I see that you have AI powered translations as well nowadays and and now serious you see about how you know you saw technology reshaping legal communication more and more having the opportunity to see it first person in the last two decades. And tell you, I'll give you a little bit of background. This is something that Alexa translations we had sort of identified early on. We had started dabbling with forms of early technology as early as 2012. So the early in the iteration of the organization, we had looked to develop a variety of different technologies on our own, ultimately getting to 2018 and acquisition that we did offer an AI machine translation company. So while we had used variety of different forms, this was sort of the most advanced at the time they had started to use AI for translation. And much like how we thought there would be disruption and legal before LM's or generative AI is here today in translation, we saw that much earlier because everyone would have been familiar with tools like Google Translate or some of the tools that are available freely in the market and you could see those tools getting better. So our hypothesis is that as time goes on, AI is going to play a bigger role in our lives and the earlier we get into it, the better it is not. And, and the same parallels applying the legal technology, right? So if you have good training data, so really think of in our context, really good translations, what that could do in terms of buildings or models. You could produce very high end quality translations at the first draft, which translators can then refine and bring to the finish line. I think that's a lot of where you're going to see in the legal space as well, where the evolution of the tech tools leads to basically an evolution of the workflow that that lawyer pursues. So drafting will not be done from scratch anymore. So any, any due diligence, any litigation discovery, think of all the various things that document review that a lot of younger lawyers did in their early days will not be done manual anymore. You were going to have technology to 1st rounds of and professions being involved. Once you have a first tranche of essentially technology will say, OK, these ones may be relevant, let's have a professional look at it, but they'll narrow down a lot of the heavy lifting that before would have done manually. So that was particularly exciting. I think the we're going into an era much like we did with translation, where starting from scratch was just inefficient. I think we're going to see the same thing with lawyers. And frankly, while there is a bit of discomfort in the market saying what does this mean for us as their job going to change, I'm a big believer that it will really help do things that lawyers didn't particularly enjoy anyway. So like if you think about, let's say, drafting an agreement starting from scratch was not particularly enjoyable. And a lot of lawyers, as you can imagine, templates, etc. And then focus on certain, on certain clauses based on the context of that particular file that may be working on. It will be the same thing now, except that even some of those particular clauses on that particular file, you will now give context to the tools and they will produce something that is very close to the final product you would have done where the lawyer's job now just became faster. So you'll be able to give clients more predictable fees up front, give some context around what this would look like and certain other areas like litigation and being in court, etcetera. Like it'll help with preparation, but naturally, you're not going to have a, I represent clients at court, at least not in the foreseeable future. So it'll be interesting to see this play out. Amazing though. That sounds really, really interesting. And if I may ask you, what are some of the challenges that you've been finding as well and that maybe you've seen the profession bring to you specifically for lawyers when it comes to language barriers and translation? And, and I'll use the example of translation and then sort of bring it out more broadly as well. So in translation, you know, lawyers are often dealing with many things at the same time and sort of inundated with, with traffic. So one of the things that they have to do is like, OK, I need this translation done well and I need to quickly. And then you could do it with professionals, but you also have lawyers are bilingual. And this is where sort of tweaking the output that the AI provides can produce a much higher result on the roads with this feedback loop of actually training the tool. I actually compare that to hiring a junior associate. And I say, look, this is a very hard working associate. It's going to work tirelessly 24 hours a day, except it'll need some of that initial training, some of that investment. And to go in with an expectation that you're going to get something that is close to perfect from the get go is, is unrealistic because even some of the smartest associates, they will need some training, some context around the work. No matter how much research they do on their own, no matter how much they've read, and we know today's AI tools have read a lot, it still needs some further tweaking before you can get to the final process. The beauty of how technologies evolve these days is that it will keep getting better out-of-the-box. And we see this with translation or you can actually sort especially our tool, because it's trained in the league of financial space, it will do really well out-of-the-box. The moment you give us some feedback saying, hey, here's the tweaks I made to this document, then you can see that evolution. Next time you actually work in on the same type of content, you don't need to touch up the same things again. It's really learn. It applies those scenarios, but also applies the logic to scenarios that never seen before. So this is the true artificial intelligence is that it draws from the logic that you're doing, not strictly just the exact changes. And now the same parallel would apply to any other tool, right? So let's use the drafting example we said earlier. So while the tool produces certain drafts, if you made some tweaks to the drafts, and this is key because the tool cannot read your mind until you tell it, hey, here's how I changed it. And as the tools get smarter, then I'll say, OK, I understand the logic. I understand what Claudio did it this way because this is what he was thinking. This was the train of thought that happened on it. That's so when you think of challenges is sometimes we overestimate how much technology can do from the get go. And although it's going to substantially better and etc, it still needs some further context. But at the same time, we underestimate how quickly can evolve once we give it some feedback. So as feedback to anyone listening, I would say embrace it. Know that don't expect perfection from day one, but if you give it sort of the a fair bit of attention, it will evolve rather quickly and go to go back to that as a junior associate example, if they are a very smart junior associate, they'll pick up things quickly and really evolve for your purposes and then work tirelessly. You just have to make that initial. Investment, amazing. I I'm wondering now if senior lawyers who are very, very much adopting AI and who also work a lot, junior associates, whether they're, they're prompting, has also prompted them to give better instructions, But then they're telling associates what you do, just like they have to do with the I it's, it's a very interesting moment here. If I were to ask you now on a more personal entrepreneurship business side as well, I'd love to hear a little more about, you know, leadership lessons that maybe you've learned along the way that might surprise lawyers or professionals where first, you know, getting ready to go into this journey of being an entrepreneur beach, you know, starting their own law firm or maybe even going to a quasi legal industry. So I always have some tips that I share with any aspiring entrepreneurs. It's often the answer is now is better than later. So starting earlier down the path is, is, is always good. And, and I say this in the context of think of most people graduating law school, they're relatively early and they may not have a family or the family maybe sort of early stages, maybe a spouse or partner and not even having children yet. The risk appetite is a little larger than when you actually have kids and sort of the, the obligations that come along with it. So as a result, once there's a level of learning that and obviously in law that requires a little bit before sort of going and setting up your own shop or even setting up a company that is separate from law, much like my example, which is detached from legal practice for the most part. And there's certainly legal applications working in translation. But the thought process of starting early is helpful because you learn, you iterate, but you also have the, the risk appetite is higher and you can also, you have the runway to learn. You'll make mistakes along the way. It's, it's inevitable no matter how much you plan. And you know, there's forms of this phrase that come that I've heard from a variety of executives now is better than perfect. So you can plan all you want. Things won't go perfectly and won't go exactly how you plan. So I think being able to be nimble and and sort of advanced quickly is paramount. And to use the technology example, we said earlier, we have a lot of technology tools that can actually help do things that before we have to rely a lot more on on professionals to help us. So whether it's drafting marketing collateral content, whether it is creating websites, whether it is virtual assistance that can do things for you as an entrepreneur. Now you can achieve a lot more by using technology effectively. That doesn't mean you have to be proficient when you go down that path, but it needs this relentless curiosity to say, let me learn how to do this. Let me see how I can figure out this and iterate a bit more. And because your resources are stretched, especially in the early days, you want to make sure you can use all these tools at your disposal. There are now evolving out there as it is to really jump down that path. So to go back to your original point around advice, it's start sooner than later. So if you have an idea it's crystallized or you, you have a really good sense of what you want to do, do it now. Use all this solutions that are out available out there. So research and that relentless curiosity. It will naturally be a lot of hard work and worship is by no means I don't like to have a boss because you know, it's I work too hard and and I don't enjoy it. I want to do some of my own. It's not like you're working any less when you work on your own, but it is. You will move much faster the harder you work at it, of course. Amazing and and Speaking of that, I, I got curious here show about those leadership lessons and all of that and I wanted to ask you a little bit about the role of relationships as you become an entrepreneur as you go towards that path. I saw that you your self host a podcast and you bring a lot of good friends from a lifetime it seems like. So I was, I was curious, you know, also how that network has helped you to stay afloat. Well, and cardio I, it's been fundamental to our success. The initial now where I spent a lot of time developing and and sort of cultivating overtime as being critical to our success was relationships really matter. And especially in the day, in the context of technology, the people want to work with organizations and people they trust. Inevitably when you're working, especially the service business, things are bound to go wrong even in technology. So they need to know that there's a partner that the moment something is not meeting expectations, not going exactly how they want, they will, they will jump on it, address it quickly and show that true approach to, to really problem solving and finding solutions for the client. And the relationship building is just that, that when there is a relationship, they everyone on the on the other side knows that, OK, I can pick up the phone and call Gary or I can go Claudio and I know that this will be addressed. I don't have to wander, especially in the tech space, create a ticket. And then it goes into this black box. And you never know when you hear back, right? So that becomes particularly important. I just participated and wrote a chapter in a book called Networking for Success with my friends David Souci and Mark Healy, and it's called the ripple effect. Networking for success. The ripple effect is now actually available on on at bookstores and on Amazon, etcetera. There's a variety of Canadian entrepreneurs participated in it, entrepreneurs and executives and sort of broad spectrum former politicians like in the case of dates and the idea of a rounded was how did networking help this group of executives and entrepreneurs, etcetera and what the tips that they pursued was. And there are some themes you will see across the various chapters. And it's really that investing in the network is so critical and it makes a huge difference in in the long term success. Amazing. Well, going forward here to to a little bit of a different topic now and thinking about, you know, this next generation of lawyers coming to the market. If you were advising young lawyers today, I'm curious to hear a little bit of your thoughts and what your early career lawyers, law students, what kind of skills or what kind of experience would you encourage them to seek out? So I think one of the things that law schools have traditionally not been as thorough with is teaching business skills to lawyers. Like there's a lot of effort going into the law, but understanding the business skills because whether you're in a large law firm, whether you're running your own firm or you're an entrepreneur, there's a lot of business because that go into it. And a lot of it is understanding client relationships as well. And understanding the client, not just the law, because so much of his dynamics of the business and not just knowing the law because to actually add value to the clients effectively, you need to understand their perspective. What are they going through? Put yourselves in their shoes. So getting exposure to the clients themselves can be and and their shoes can be particularly helpful. So As for law students, you know, historically reading a lot about the various areas. So if they're interested in finance, for example, to be on top of what's happening in the finance world, reading a bit proactive so they can understand what it looks like. So that the issues of the day, when they hear about it in a future firm context, they they have, they're pretty well understood and and they understand, OK, this is what goes into it. If there's any dynamics that happen in, in a certain business context with certain executives to also be aware because they can often transfer into files for the firms down the road. Um, I had on my podcast, as you indicated earlier last year, Claudio, my friend Walid Soliman at noon Rose, who's the chairman of Norman Rose. And he said, Hey, if you don't start by reading the Globe and Mail regularly, you're starting the day behind sort of a couple of steps behind the people that are. So that provides good perspective and that's a good. So habit or hygiene, let's say to get into since before becoming a lawyer, because then it's a good habit to get into it. So I would say publications of the nature, we can really learn whether it's global mail, whether it's Bloomberg, whether it's the Economist, understand what's happening at a more global level. Those can be really helpful, especially if you're interested in corporate law, for example, but just general knowledge in general. And so, so being informed is a key part of it. So to, to being the clients shoes, I would say the next category is really familiarizing yourself with technology. We know it will be a big part of all our lives. So it's not acceptable to say, well, I'm not really a tech savvy person. Like I'll refer to the tech, the tech team of this, especially as lawyers are younger, that's worth the investment. The, the more they can learn early on, the better it is. And not to default to that, like, well, I'll just defer to the professionals around this. I think having a good understanding of it is, is important, not that we expect the lawyers to become programmers, but to understand how technology can augment their workflow. The last thing and ties into the question you said earlier would be network, network, network. So your social capital is extremely critical. I talk about it in the ripple effect and it's that that social capital can really help. This will be whether it's colleagues right now that will eventually become colleagues at other firms or in-house counsel or entrepreneurs that you can work with, whether it is that they are meeting potential new clients or even colleagues that can open doors in other ways. But it's just so important to have this. The, the value of social capital can be extremely critical. If you think about the path of partnership in a lot of firms is that to become partner, you're expected to bring some business to the firm, not just become a technical expert. And for that to be the case, that means you expect to have relationships and relationships that trust you will give you work. And that work can then sort of materialize into revenue for the firm. Cultivating that mindset early on can be particularly important in Tastic. Fantastic. Thank you so much for those. And moving forward to another points that you mentioned, you mentioned you sit on a few boards and and one of them being Junior Achievement both Americas and Canada. So I was curious to know a little more about this work that you're involved in, in, in youth empowerment and also if you see a role that you know lawyers and entrepreneurs have in giving back to the community globally? Well, I think. Claudio, all of us have sort of a social responsibility to give back to the community in one way or another. And I think especially lawyers, they have a a really good understanding of corporate structure compared to non lawyers that you think about boards depending on the not-for-profit, you could have boards that are more direction setting and some that are more hands on. But there's a whole slew of legal issues that come up at the board level from proper governance to ethics, etcetera. And having people with legal training can be really helpful because they can, while they don't have to be the specialist obviously have to be able to identify. It's like, hey, we may actually need some advice on this or we have to think of it with this lens. So lawyers getting involved in in this board is particularly helpful. And I know in the junior Junior Achievement America and Canada board, we would have historically had lawyers on junior team in Canada. Currently about four lawyers. So like, you know, have certainly well represented and the, and the lawyers bring a level of critical thinking low aside a level of critical thinking that is there also breaks down issues, much like how you read those cases where you see judges, you know, very learned judges return certain logic and certain tests to put things through in the future where you say, I wonder how they came up with that in the 1st place. And that's again, years of experience being transferred into logic to to break it down. And you can imagine that's can be very helpful when you're leading an organization and breaking that up as it is now. In my case, I thought Junior Schuman is really focused on financial literacy and and youth entrepreneurship, both causes them very passionate about. That's the Junior Achievement organization have been involved with for 11 years and and all continue to be involved because of their mandate. But cause aside, because we all have causes that that we're passionate about. I'm also involved with lawsuits, which is an organization that focuses on helping lawyers fundraiser for cancer, for example. So Rick, cause aside, I think one get involved because your skill set is very helpful to this organization will help it learn. But also to the networking point earlier, some of the best people I've met have been through being involved in these boards and the fulfillment that you get is worth the time investment because you're contributing, but you get a personal fulfillment. It's, it's a lot, a lot of them can be significant amount of work, but it's different work than your day-to-day, which is switching gears can be helpful to your mindset and you're meeting with some of the people, some people that are coming from walks of life that you wouldn't necessarily have met but for, for these boards. So in many ways, it's actually really helpful to to the to the actual volunteer when in this case lawyers themselves and they get a lot out of it just as much as they're putting into helping the organization. Amazing. Well. To, to wrap up today's episode, Gary, I'd, I'd love to ask you about, you know, sometimes lawyers have a bad reputation for not being, you know, quick to adapt to new technology. And then maybe that the, the legal system is true traditional, true conservative and it doesn't take risks and all of that. But I want to rescue you. If you were to give some kind of advice for lawyers who are, you know, they have a good idea, they want to innovate, they want to create a new venture within this very traditional legal system, what what would be the, the kind of advice you'd give them? So. And I'll start more broadly, anytime lawyers or any entrepreneur wants to go and solve a problem, it's start with a big pain point. Like what is a big pain point that you can help address and then break out like here's the solutions that can be with it. The good thing with lawyers coming up with entrepreneurial ventures, especially if they are in the legal spaces that they come with the credibility of, OK, I understand what this looks like day-to-day. And I've seen a variety of tech ventures that have done really well at legal tech ventures where you had lawyers actually approached us and say, hey, as a lawyer, here's how it address it and they comes with credibility. It also comes with a level of understanding that somebody that would have come externally say just a tech entrepreneur would have not understood as well unless they had a lawyer sort of partner that they could provide that perspective. So resolve a big pain point, approach it with the level of let's find solutions that can help sort of improve certain workflows. And then similarly, if the lawyers wanted to pursue something outside of law, the same approach, like I would apply the same approach. Think about my case. It was largely, you know, knowing that translation for organizations would or would be cumbersome and often slow. Can you use AI to really help improve that workflow and by customizing it heavily to particular companies. So again, the pain point being we knew that they would spend a lot of money on translation. It is the timeline was of importance and by embracing sort of that level of change of OK, how do I develop technology that can help resolve this, but also the change management that comes with it. So getting good technology is only part of it. You have to actually work with the people to say, here's how you adopt it. And to your point, cloud, you sometimes lawyers have been slow to adopt. And I don't think it's because the nature of lawyers is that they don't like technology, but often we're running at 100 miles an hour. So you don't have a lot of time to pause and think, how do I do this? And lawyers are also trained to be a bit risk averse by their very trained, say, what are things that this technology could do wrong? You know, And, and while that's, that's a good lens to still keep in mind, because certainly technology at the pace that's evolving can have its challenges. I think a level of open mindedness and continuous experimentation will be key. So continuously experimentation, setting up a certain amount of time to say, even if I spent 2-3 hours a week doing a level of experimentation with X tool or tool can be a really good way to making sure you're, you're getting there. And sometimes you don't have to go think about this in strictly the sense of I'm going to go set up a new venture, resolve a problem. Sometimes it could be I am part of the litigation group at this law firm and we have a pain point that is ours. I can show an initiative that can help resolve it from my group by showing this sort of level of entrepreneurial approach to it and saying I can go and look at some solutions externally, bring about that advice to the group and implement that internally without having to necessarily go set up a business. Entrepreneurship can well be alive and well within an organization and doesn't have to be strictly in setting up a business. Amazing. I love. That well, I really just wanted to thank you once again for taking the time to be in the podcast today to share all of these really interesting insights and also thank you all for tuning in and listening Thank you for. Having me, it's been a pleasure to be here.