A conversation with Thomson Reuters’ Patrick Hurley: How building trust-based relationships foster long-term business success
Ever wanted to tap into the genius behind Thomson Reuters’ long-lasting success? Here’s your opportunity! Today’s guest is Patrick Hurley. Vice President of Thomson Reuters’ Global Specialty Support division. Patrick has been with Thomson Reuters for over 25 years and has been a major contributor to the company’s success. Today Patrick and Bim discuss how to build trust-based customer relationships that stand the test of time. Patrick also shares tips and tricks for keeping your productivity up amongst all today’s electronic distractions.
In this episode, Bim and Patrick also discuss the acquisition of a majority stake in Elite by private equity firm TPG. Today’s podcast was recorded before this announcement was released. As a long-time partner of Thomson Reuters Elite, Helm360 understands the potential uncertainties and transitions this may bring for our customers. We want to assure you that we are here to support you throughout this process and into the future. We believe this transaction will provide Elite with greater focus, resources, and growth opportunities. Join us as we delve into the implications of this acquisition and explore the exciting possibilities it holds for both Elite and the legal industry as a whole.
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
Your host
Bim Dave is Helm360’s Executive Vice President. With 15+ years in the legal industry, his keen understanding of how law firms and lawyers use technology has propelled Helm360 to the industry’s forefront. A technical expert with a penchant for developing solutions that improve business systems and user experience, Bim has a knack for bringing high quality IT architects and developers together to create innovative, useable solutions to the legal arena.
Today’s guest
Patrick Hurley has been with Thomson Reuters for over 25 years, beginning as a customer service manager and working his way to the top of the corporate hierarchy, where he is currently the Vice President of Global Specialty Support. Before joining Thomson Reuters, Patrick worked for many technology firms, such as Elite Information Systems, where he served as the product manager for Elite’s then leading-edge products Workflow and WebView.
Transcript
Bim: Hello Legal Helm listeners. Today on our show, I am excited to be talking with Patrick Hurley, Vice President of Global Specialty Support at Thomson Reuters. Patrick’s career at Thomson Reuters spans over 25 years, where he’s played some of the most impactful roles, including managing product lines that have survived the test of time at some of the largest law firms in the world. You know what I’m talking about: Elite WebView.
He has long been known for his unique ability to build long lasting connections with customers, employees, and partners alike. He also happens to be my ex-boss, colleague, and above all a dear friend. And today I’m going to be talking to Patrick about legal technology landscape, past, present, and future.
Patrick, thank you very much for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk to me today and welcome to the show.
Patrick: Thanks very much. A pleasure to be here. Just to be clear, ex-boss, but not ex-friend, right?
Bim: Oh, that’s right. Yes. my bad. Current friend.
Patrick: Okay, good. I just want to make sure. But yeah, happy to be here. Thank you for having me.
Bim: Excellent. I thought we could start right at the very beginning, and I’m really keen to learn a little bit about how you ended up in the legal technology space to begin with.
Patrick: Right at the beginning. Oh, back many, many, many decades ago. It was very random, like so many people’s careers. When, young folks ask me for career advice, it’s so much about being in the right place at the right time. I was struggling out of university to find any kind of job whatsoever. I ended getting a temp job in the file room as an office junior at a law firm, which was supposed to be two weeks, someone was on holiday, but they liked me better than the, guy who was on holiday, so they offered to make me permanent.
It happened to be when they were putting in computers (that’s how old I am) and they sent everybody to learn WordPerfect and DOS and Novell Networking… and it made sense to me more than most of the other people in the office. I became the def facto computer guy without any formal training. I spent a few years there and then moved to this little tiny startup software company that had about 30 people, just sold, software to law firms in Southern California, called Elite Data Processing.
And that’s how the journey began.
Bim: Excellent. It’s so interesting and revealing to hear words like Novell. A lot of our audience probably don’t even know what that means, but it gives us an indication as to how old we both are.
As I mentioned in your intro, you’ve obviously enjoyed a very long career at Thomson Reuters and continued to do so. What would you say stands out as your biggest achievements at Thomson Reuters?
Patrick: I’m incredibly, grateful and lucky and, and privileged to have had such interesting and varied career at Thomson Reuters. Elite was purchased by then Thomson, before the Thomson, merger. I think it was purchased in 2003. So, I’ve been really lucky to have lived in three countries with the business. I had roles in product management and technology and professional services and now I’m back in a support role and working with products all across the corporation, not just those In legal, which is exciting accomplishments. I mean, every day is an accomplishment, but I get my job satisfaction out of the human interaction.
You mentioned WebView, , which if I look at where that product was when we launched it and how it’s still used today, almost 30 years later. There are still major law firms running WebView. I was one of many people involved in the success of WebView, so that’s exciting.
But what I get job satisfaction out of is the human interaction. Turning customers from unhappy to, generally happy, satisfied through, efforts, seeing colleagues succeed, seeing, teammates and people that started out junior to me having successful careers. Bim you are a prime example of someone I’m proud to say I worked with and helped you to get where you are. Those kinds of things are where I get my greatest sense of accomplishment.
Bim: Thank you very much. And yes, you did. You helped me a lot to get to where I am. I’m very grateful for that.
Patrick: I didn’t mean to ask for that clearly but, you’re a good example. You’ve been successful beyond any of our dreams at the time. Not at Thomson Reuters, but you’re in the industry making good things happen and partnering with Thomson Reuters in in a really mutually beneficial way for both our businesses.
Bim: I appreciate that. You touched on WebView again. I do want to dig into that a little bit more because even today I speak to customers who love the product. Some of them still use the product, and actually find it difficult to let go of the product. It’s that good. What do you think the secret to success was for WebView? Why did it hit the market so well, why have lawyers in particular fallen in love with, using it?
Patrick: So much of it is right place at the right time. It was the right time for that product. I’ve seen us being ahead of our time and those products can’t quite make it. I think the original idea for a name was the lawyer’s desktop and that’s a concept that still resonates. Many software companies out there use that exact same concept, if not that same branded name. It was the first because lawyers were just starting to become computer literate. When I started at Elite, you’d never get a lawyer to use a computer. WebView came out right at about the time when younger lawyers were, were saying, “No, I want a computer. I want to be able to look at stuff on my own. I don’t, I use a computer at home. I should have one at the office and don’t make me ask my secretary for everything. Give me the data.”
It was timing. And of course, the amazing development team we had. I left the product management of that many, many years ago. I have to give a shout out to Patty Gell, who shepherded it through its major successes for, for many, many years.
Bim: I the pleasure of supporting that product for T Reuters when I was there as well.
Patrick: It’s a takes a village.
Bim: I think there’s a lot there, some lessons to learn from a product like that because like you said, timing was one of the things. I also think it did exactly what it needed to do for the community of users that were using it. It gave them the information they needed in an easy to consume manner. There are a lot of products these days that could learn from that. Simplicity is sometimes the key to to success. I think that’s one of the reasons that drove its success and why people still love it.
Patrick: We did a lot which was still relatively nascent in the, in the software community. We had user groups and focus groups and we had a lot of “how about this” approach showing prototypes, releasing early versions to customers. That’s more common today but it was new for us and new among our competitors. We were taking very immediate feedback from the market was telling us they liked and didn’t like. I think that helped a lot.
Bim: You’ve spent a lot of time in that product space. Many of the roles you’ve held have been around service delivery and client facing. Managing customer relationships. From the outside looking in, it’s obvious to me that you’ve built a reputation based on trust and building trusted relationships with those customers. I’m interested to understand your approach to getting there, to building a customer relationship built on trust and, most importantly, keeping it intact for a long period of time. I think there’s some nice lessons to learn for the community of listeners that we have here in terms of how to build long-lasting relationships.
Patrick: First of all, thank you for those kind words. I like to think I approach every interaction, with, trust first. We’re not going into anything in an antagonistic or adversarial approach. I think it’s not, B2B business to business, it’s people to people. I’m not talking to the law firm. I’m talking to a person who has a job, who has a boss, who has their own personal stresses, their own insecurities, their own challenges. It’s personal to person. Every interaction is a human interaction. It’s not about business. If you can, approach things with empathy for another person’s situation and ultimately, both parties want the same thing in any interaction, which is they both want to win, right? To be successful and that win makes it sound like a competition. I didn’t really mean that, but they won’t both want success for the software product that they that bought or for the project that they’re working on. Nobody wants the other side to fail.
I’m like throwing cliché after cliché at you, but, there’s some truth to those clichés.
Bim: Yes, absolutely. A and very wise words. I want to switch gears a little bit and focus on the legal and professional services industry that we serve. Obviously, the last few years have been challenging, for the industry generally and most, companies. What challenges do you see for the year ahead in terms of the legal and professional services industry, from your perspective?
Patrick: I think not dissimilar to the challenges every business is facing. You know, the future of work and what is it that. Things are changing so rapidly and a lot of the speed of that change is due to the, the pandemic. From a legal services/professional services industry, they’re going to be changes in the balance between lawyer support, staff ratio, both with the issue of remote working. We don’t need as many support staff supporting as a brick and mortar building. We’re also finding senior level partners are becoming much more self-sufficient working at home because there isn’t somebody right outside their door to print that document or get that file or do that task. People are tackling things in a more holistic approach. At the same time, technology like AI, things like robotic process automation, all the easy stuff Is gonna be taken away by technology. What is that going to do to the human resources makeup of a law firm? I think it’s a challenge people are going to have to puzzle out.
I think what the pandemic taught us all is if forced we can all change. Law firms learned that lesson. They can change. And they proved it with the lockdown.
Bim: Absolutely. I think the change in the way that we work has impacted things is quite interesting. Last year, I was in our India office and it was quite interesting because we’d hired a bunch of people through the pandemic who had never been to the office. Some of them were quite young, graduates from university, for example. They’d literally never been into an office and understood the collaborative working space that an office allows you to bring to the table. I think it was quite an eye-opener because you could see the excitement in them. Being able to collaborate around a coffee machine and get free coffee and have conversations. It’s really nice to see. We can see some of that dynamic coming back. I hope that we don’t lose sight of that because that collaborative. Element, of being together in a space, is so powerful.
Patrick: A hundred percent agree with you. It is the thing that AI will never be able to emulate. That magic that happens when two human brains organically connect and feed on each other and you overhear a conversation and that makes you think of something else. And it’s unquantifiable. There’s a lot of wasted time with that too because you have to hear about its weekends and yada yada, yada, but it builds a social trust bank of relationships that then can feed your interactions over Teams or Zoom, for years to come, in a way that technology can’t.
So yeah, I agree a hundred percent. How can we keep that magic of IRL, real life human interaction, alive in this disparate, remote environment?
Bim: You talk of AI. That’s one of the areas that I wanted to touch on with you from a Thomson Reuters perspective. Obviously there’s a lot of excitement and interest over OpenAI’s GPT models and ChatGPT. I’ interested to get your take on that. Is there anything from a Thomson Reuters perspective that’s coming down the pipe that may be leveraging that technology?
Patrick: Constantly. I mean, almost everything that we’re doing has some sort of AI angle to it. Thomson Reuters has been, working with AI technology for over 30 years. Our legal research software has embedded variations of early versions of AI, 25 years ago or more. Whether or not ChatGPT, that specific technology will be incorporated, I can neither predict, confirm or deny. We made a big acquisition in an AI company last year called Thought Trace. It’s how we’re tackling every customer solution. It’s a fascinating time to be in technology in general.
Bim: Indeed. Moving at a very fast pace. With regard to some of the other TR offerings that would be of interest to this space. We’ve got obviously 3E Cloud, HighQ and other products around that. I’m interested to get an update from you in terms of how the cloud adoption side of things is going from a Thomson Reuter’s perspective. Any advice for firms that may be sitting on the fence in terms of that shift to cloud and moving to 3E Cloud? What advice would you have for those kinds of firms?
Patrick: Let’s just get off the fence quickly or you’ll be left behind. Virtually every single new deal we’re signing is a cloud deal. There’s hardly anyone purchasing anything on-premise anymore. and that happened very quickly over the over the course the pandemic. I’m sure the pandemic was part of the cause for it. People’s comfort with “I don’t know where my data is. I’m working at my home in Kent or wherever, who knows where my data is, but I can get to it,” was a general fear. Now there’s more acceptance to cloud stuff in general.
But yeah, if you don’t have plans to get all your applications to the cloud, then get some plans right away because you will be left behind.
Bim: Good advice. I want to go back to the beginning of the conversation a little bit in terms of the career you’ve walked through. Any big lessons learned that you could share with the audience in terms of all of the experiences that you have had? Because you’ve touched so many different areas in terms of the technology, the product and service, delivery, support, all of the different angles. What’s your biggest lesson learned so far?
Patrick: Biggest lesson learned? Boil it down into one? It’s a sort of a combination of don’t sweat the small stuff and pick your battles. We get mired in the firefighting and the chaos and the drama and the daily emergencies that come at us and you don’t see the progress that is being made. I think for me it took quite a long time to gain maturity of perspective. If you don’t get stressed out, it doesn’t mean you’re not equally as attentive to the crises and responsive to the crises, but you don’t let them get inside you. Because tomorrow there’ll be another crisis and, in a year, there’ll be another crisis. They’re all solvable. So, don’t sweat the small stuff. Pick your battles. This too shall pass. and you are making progress.
Bim: I’m sure many can relate to that. Absolutely. just moving on a little, I just want to talk a little bit about, information overload. I’m sure you can relate to this. We’ve got so many different channels of communication now. Some of them are really good and positive and aid collaboration. Let’s talk about Microsoft Teams as a good example. Where we can connect in a different way and it becomes a useful tool for conversations and connecting with colleagues, especially in this distributed model that we now live. I’m interested to get your take in terms of how you manage yourself from a productivity perspective. Any productivity hacks or tips that you can share with the audience? Because I get bombarded with Teams messages, emails, and all sorts of things. In the old days, it was just email that we had to worry about and the occasional telephone call, which I don’t think anybody does anymore. I’m interested to hear from what kind of productivity techniques, hacks software, maybe that you use in your day-to-day workflow that allows you to achieve something meaningful by the end of the week.
Patrick: I think that’s a continuing evolution as technology changes. From a personal perspective, at the end of last year, gave up Twitter and I felt that that added hours to my day. If not necessarily hours, it reduced a lot of just noise in my head. It was a hard addiction to give up because I used it for all of my news, all of my pop culture. That’s just one personal example. You always have to monitor and compromise and say no to this stream. So, limiting what social media you do pay attention to is super important because no matter what you do, it’s going to interrupt your day, either your workday or, or your personal day in some way.
I always, I find it fascinating looking back over the last several decades at which technologies stick and which are a flash in the pan; they looked really cool at first but ended up not surviving. I remember when I had a Palm Pilot, a beeper, and a cell phone. All three things. I needed all three things: manage my diary on the Palm Pilot, get emergency notifications on my beeper, and call people on my cell phone. Whatever happened to Palm Pilot? It was so cool. I’m aging myself there, but there’s a fine balance between jumping on every latest bandwagon and waiting a little bit to see if it’s really going to take off because you’ll drive yourself crazy trying to learn every new technology. I went a roundabout circle to answer your question, but going back to the beginning, I do constantly re-look at what am I doing, what am I wasting time on, what is distracting to me, and I try and wean myself off it. I’m not someone who has implemented some amazing organizational technique that I’m here to sell you. It’s just a constant evolution.
Bim: Indeed. I think that’s great advice. I think the ability to disconnect a little bit from the social media world is going to free up a bunch of hours. Totally get it and agree. Thank you for that.
I just have a couple of wrap up questions. The first one, which I ask all of my guests is: If you could borrow Dr. Who’s time machine and go back to Patrick at 18 years old, if you can remember, that far back, what advice would you give him? And you can’t give him the national lottery numbers.
Patrick: What advice would I give him? Youth is wasted on the young. Enjoy every moment.
Bim: Good advice. You mentioned at the beginning that you’ve worked in different locations. If you could, choose one of the locations as your favorite, which one and why?
Patrick: I spent four years in Zurich and I skied every weekend during the winter and went mountain hiking every weekend in the summer. From a location perspective, that was, is, heaven to me.
Bim: Indeed. And finally, any closing thoughts or advice that may benefit the legal professionals in our audience today?
Patrick: The future is in value-based billing. Figure that out and you’ll be successful.
Bim: Love it. Thank you very much, Patrick. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you today. Really appreciate you taking the time out and look forward to speaking to you again.
Patrick: Thanks a lot. It’s been fun. Great to chat. Take care.
Bim: Thank you.