TLH Ep.30 How being a Tech-Savvy lawyer helps you win tech clients.

Welcome to The Legal Helm Podcast! Today, we’re thrilled to bring you an insightful conversation with Sophia Matveeva, CEO and founder of Tech for Non Techies, an executive education and consulting company. Sophia’s expertise has been featured in prestigious publications such as the Harvard Business Review, Financial Times, The Guardian, and Forbes, where she shares her insights on entrepreneurship and technology.

As if that weren’t impressive enough, Sophia also hosts the top-rated Tech for Non Techies podcast. In this episode, we dive into a fascinating discussion about how being a tech-savvy lawyer can significantly impact your ability to attract and serve tech clients.

Without further ado, let’s welcome Sophia Matveeva to the show!

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.

Our Guest

Sophia Matveeva is the CEO & founder of Tech For Non-Techies, an executive education and consulting company. She has contributed to the Harvard Business Review, Financial Times, The Guardian, and Forbes on entrepreneurship and technology, and hosts the top-rated Tech for Non-Techies podcast. Sophia has guest lectured at the University of Chicago, London Business School, and Oxford University, and mentors startups at the Chicago Booth Polsky Center of Entrepreneurship. She holds an MBA from Chicago Booth and a BSc (Hons) in Politics from Bristol, speaking English, Russian, and French. Sophia also advises leading accelerators and sits on the Advisory Board to Riviter, an AI-driven consumer trend prediction firm.

Transcript

Bim Dave: Hello Legal Helm listeners. Today I am delighted to be speaking with Sophia Matveeva, CEO and founder of Tech for Non Techies, an executive education and consulting company. Sophia has contributed to the Harvard Business Review, Financial times, the guardian and Forbes on entrepreneurship and technology.

If that’s not enough, she also hosts the top rated tech for non techies podcast. In today’s podcast, I’m going to be talking to Sophia about how being a tech savvy lawyer helps you win tech clients. Sophia, hello and welcome to the show.

Sophia Matveeva: Hello, Bim. I am so excited to be here. Thank you.

Bim Dave: Good to hear. So Sophia, maybe we could start with you telling us a little bit about your journey and the journey that led you to Tech for Non Techies.

Sophia Matveeva: Wonderful. Thank you. So I think the first thing I’d want listeners to know is that I am not a lawyer. So I’m not speaking from a lawyer’s perspective, but I am speaking from a client’s perspective, and this is why I thought it might be useful for the people listening to show to hear from me. So I started my career working in the media.

Then I worked in private equity in London, and then I got my MBA at Chicago booth and, Chicago Booth is the business school of the University of Chicago. So, uh, some, some of your listeners are going to know about the University of Chicago Law School, which is legendary. Barack Obama was a teacher there before he went into politics.

And so the business school is also ranked number one and usually most of the rankings around the world. And the reason why I’m telling you about this is obviously I want to impress you. But also what I want to show is that I went to this really great business school, but I then found out that actually I didn’t learn anything about technology.

And so my MBA, my MBA fees were 180, 000. And for the Americans listening to this, your law school fees, if you want to be one of the top law schools, it would be kind of the same. So, you know, I feel your pain, you feel mine. But anyway, when I was doing my MBA, I decided to start a tech company and I got a team together.

We raised some money. We went through one of the top accelerators in the US and That’s, you know, when I basically started hiring developers and I became the leader of a tech company. And that’s when I really realized that I had no idea what the developers were saying to me, I literally didn’t know the words, like I didn’t understand what a tech stack was or what an API was, and I didn’t know about dependencies and all of these other terms.

And I didn’t understand how they translated to business. Which I found immensely frustrating, obviously after having paid so much money. Right. And so then what I decided to do is I thought, okay, well, I’m going to find out how other people who are leaders in technology, but who are not coders, what they’ve had to learn about tech.

Because I think, Bim, I think a lot of people, you know, We, we get given this idea of what a tech innovator is. And we get told that it’s Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or Bill Gates. And all of these people started their careers. They started their lives as developers and then they became CEOs. But I was thinking, well, you know, I’m not, I don’t want to retrain as a computer scientist, what am I supposed to do?

And so I started writing about what I was learning as a non technical founder of a tech company in Forbes. And those articles did very well. And one thing led to another London business school asked me to teach. Then students at Oxford’s business school asked me to teach and so on and so forth. And that’s how Tech for Non Techies was created.

So, Tech for Non Techies really helps. Smart, highly educated, ambitious people who are not technical. So it’s the lawyers, it’s the business people to basically understand enough about technology so they can succeed in the digital age without having to learn to code because I learned to code and I really didn’t like it and I wasn’t very good at it and it just doesn’t suit a lot of people.

So, I want to save people the time and pain. Does that make sense?

Bim Dave: Totally. Yes. And thank you for sharing some of that background. It makes total sense to me. So, I’d love to dive in a little bit deeper on that in terms of some of the experience that you kind of went through on that journey of being a startup and how do you. kind of correlate some of that experience back to what lawyers face today in terms of being able to get a little bit closer to somebody that was in your position where you were running a tech company, um, and some of the experiences that you had directly working with lawyers and engaging with them.

Tell, tell us a little bit about some of the challenges in a little bit more detail and, and what, what advice do you have as a result of that? What wisdoms, wisdom did you kind of walk away with, um, to be able to enable lawyers to be a little bit more effective in terms of working with tech companies?

Sophia Matveeva: Well, that’s a great question because, you know, as you were just alluding that if you understand your clients, you can be a better strategic advisor for them. Because the kind of people that take their time to listen to your show, you know, they’re not watching Netflix, they are listening to your show in order to be better at their job.

So, these are the super ambitious people who really want to. Invest in their skillset. And those are the people who want to be strategic advisors and not people who are just drafting contracts that, you know, you can get off the internet. And so, to be a strategic advisor, you need to understand how your clients think.

And this is, there’s this huge difference between how lawyers think and how tech innovators think. So, I’ll give you an example from my own experience. I think that lots of lawyers listening to this will identify with. So, I remember we had to make, we had to create a shareholder’s agreement because we raised money.

So, we needed to have a shareholder’s agreement. And I remember, God, I think it was about 40 pages. It was this extremely long document, you know, for somebody who is not a lawyer, reading 40 pages of this legal language was very painful, but you know, Um, like millions and, you know, also thinking billions would be at stake.

So, I had to really, really pay attention and then, you know, then it becomes this whole, um, comment fest where some of, where basically my advisors are saying, okay, we need to have this. And some of the investors are saying, well, we want to have this term and lawyers are then making markups. And it becomes this kind of version upon version upon version. And whenever there was a new version, I had to pay attention to absolutely everything to make sure it was perfect. And the reason you have to pay attention and to get it right is because once that document is signed, that is a finished product. So literally with a shareholder’s agreement, I had to sign it.

The team who actually had equity had to sign it. Then all of the shareholders had to sign it. So, it wasn’t even just the signature process was a really long ordeal. And ideally, as a founder, you don’t really want to go through that process that frequently. Yes, we ended up making some amendments to the shareholder agreement once we got more and more money, but essentially it wasn’t a fun exercise.

It took a lot of time. Now let’s talk about what we, what we had to do as a team to get a new version of our app out. So, we had a consumer app and we also had an analytics product that we were selling to brands and retailers. But let’s just talk about the app because we all have apps on our phones and it’s just really easy to see.

So, when we needed to literally make a new feature, that’s like a new, some new screens for our consumer app. We would look at how people were behaving on our app. Our designer would then, based on that, would come up with some idea or some ideas of kind of what the screens should look like, they would draft the screens.

We would have a look. We’d think, yeah, okay. This, this looks like a reasonable assumption based on the data. It looks like a reasonable assumption that this is what users want. Then our engineers would code. And so, they would basically make that screen come alive. We would release it. And we would see if people use it and we would release new features about every two weeks.

And for lots of apps, that’s actually quite normal. So, we would release it and we would see, are people using this new thing that we’ve released? Do people like it? Do people not like it? And we would literally have data on what’s happening. And if it didn’t work, if people didn’t like it or people didn’t use it, we would literally just get rid of it and then we’d make a new thing.

So essentially, we were in this constant. process of creation and testing. And we were never really kind of married to the result because you never knew, like you would have an assumption you, and then you would create something. And then you would see whether that’s what people want. That’s whether that’s something that people are willing to pay for.

And if not, you would get rid of it. And so, in this example, I have just shown you that. Lawyers have to be perfectionist because their end product basically is really, really hard to change. It’s really, really hard to change a shareholder’s agreement. It’s really unpleasant. You can do it, but it’s very unpleasant.

Whereas In the tech world, in the software world, we, the tech innovators, we’re releasing something new all the time. We’re testing things all the time. So, we’re in this kind of experimental move fast and break things mode. And I don’t want you to think that one way is better than the other, because it depends on the situation.

We, us. The clients, we do not want experimental lawyers, right? I want my lawyer to give me a contract that is going to be watertight. And so, as clients, we literally pay our lawyers to check everything. So essentially, we pay our lawyers to be Risk averse to tell us where the issues are, and then we pay them to be perfectionists.

This is what lawyers are supposed to do. But on the tech side, you literally can’t be a perfectionist because you don’t know what perfect is. You don’t know what people are going to want or to like, or to pay for until you’ve given it to them. And you’re all, you always have to create something new. So, this is why I think.

When lawyers who don’t understand this big mindset shift that they have to make, they can find tech clients really, really frustrating, especially if you’re not dealing with an in-house counsel, because, you know, if there’s an in-house counsel, say at a startup, they’re kind of the buffer between say the law firm and the founders, and so they can kind of.

Translate the agile way of doing things versus the perfect way of doing things. Whereas if you’re actually dealing with the startup founder or the venture capitalists themselves as a lawyer, you really do have to appreciate the fact that they’re coming from a very, very different world and they probably annoyingly don’t appreciate the fact that.

You work very differently. Does that make sense?

Bim Dave: Yeah, totally. And I, I can totally appreciate the difference. Um, I think, I think what you described is kind of like lawyer to lawyer chat, right? Like lawyer to lawyer, um, speak is completely different and they just get each other and it’s very easy for them to translate, um, to the business. But when you don’t have that layer in front of you, it becomes very challenging to then be able to be the person that’s, you know, doing the job.

Listening to some of the technical jargon that might be used by a lawyer legitimately. Right. Um, but being able to then understand what that actually translates through into the, into the real world can be, um, can be a bit of a nightmare to be fair.

Sophia Matveeva: Yeah. And, you know, also I find that when lawyers are become, when they move from working at a law firm to becoming an in-house counsel at a tech company, I think a lot of them find it quite weird and confusing and overwhelming. And to be honest, most tech com, most tech companies are really bad at actually explaining to people that what looks like chaos is not chaos.

It’s just, it’s a different system. It’s the scientific method and the scientific method is all about. You make a hypothesis, you then test that hypothesis, and then based on your test results, you move forward. That’s a really different way of working to say the private equity world, which is where I used to work, or, you know, the law firm world where essentially you spend a lot of time on planning and analysis because the results have to be perfect.

In my experience. Big tech companies and especially startups, but even big tech, they kind of assume that everybody thinks like them. And so, then they take people from this completely different world and then they expect them to just somehow miraculously know that they’re working in a different way and I find that a lot of in-house counsel would actually just kind of benefit from understanding.

Yes, the tech terminology, you know, if you, if you don’t know what a product manager is or what a product metric is, if you don’t know what an API is, and you’re working with a tech company, they’re just going to use those words. And annoyingly, they will assume that you know them because they think everybody knows them.

And of course, of course you don’t. Like, why would you, unless somebody told you? So, I would say, yes, learn the jargon. If you’re going to be working with tech people. But also, just kind of understand that mindset that it’s much more about iteration. And because it’s about iteration, people don’t worry so much about analysis and people don’t worry so much about kind of trying to forecast whether something will work or not, because they just think, well, you know, if it doesn’t work.

It doesn’t matter if it, if it’s not a great feature, it doesn’t matter. Whereas, you know, imagine lawyer, they can’t be like, well, we think, we think this contract is going to work. Like, you know, if you buy a house and your lawyer says, well, I think you’ve got the deed to this house, but why don’t you just move in there and then just see what happens?

That’s not, you know, if your lawyer said that to you, you’d think, okay, you probably don’t know what you’re doing.

Bim Dave: Yes, indeed, indeed. So, so I’m interested to know how, how that experience of, um, working with that particular lawyer has changed your approach to engaging with the lawyer in future. So there, there are any. Tips or any qualities that you look for in the initial conversation with somebody that you might be engaging with to provide some kind of legal services to you that has been influenced by that experience.

Sophia Matveeva: Well, yes, absolutely. And, you know, so. Lawyers know that law is a relationship business, right? So, it’s all about having great relationships with your clients who then recommend you to other people, which is great if lots of people already love you and respect you. But if you’re breaking into that market, it’s really, really difficult.

So, I would say, um, that having had this experience, I definitely I’m looking for people who. Have either worked with other tech companies, like that’s kind of going to be the first thing. Kind of do I want to see, have they done this before? But also, frankly, a lot of lawyers who have worked with tech companies, somehow, you know, maybe there was super junior and they actually didn’t really interact with the client much.

And so, they didn’t learn these concepts. What I’m more interested in is understanding whether, you know, the law I’m speaking to, whether they know what a tech company looks like and how it functions from the inside and how, how tech innovators think. And, you know, um, I actually did some training for some of the world’s top global law firms.

And I thought, okay, well, I don’t want to just base it on. My experience, because, you know, I am one person, I want to see what do my friends who also run startups and what did the venture capitalists think? So, I basically, you know, did a poll. I asked some people and, uh, what everybody said was that we want people to be able to understand.

The core concept of what we do, because essentially, if we’re having to teach people what software as a service is, if we’re having to teach people what our business model is, we’re having to teach people that we have an open API and they don’t know what that is, then essentially, we are paying the billable hours to teach them stuff about our industry.

And then people say, well, you know, there are people who. Already know this stuff, which basically means that they can just get started and we don’t have to teach them to essentially, you know, to, to do what they believe is necessary. Does that make sense?

Bim Dave: Yeah, no, totally, totally. So, so if somebody, so if a lawyer is, is listening to this and thinking, this is what I need to do, tell us a little bit about how, how your training and how your service kind of helps them on that journey, it would be interesting just to see like, what is the approach? How do you, how do you not just.

Give them the education that they need to understand those concepts. But at the, the kind of the pace of change in terms of technology today, um, and, and in history, but I think, you know, at the moment things are moving very, very fast. How, how do they, how do they keep up to date? Right. Is, is the other part of it, I guess.

Sophia Matveeva: So, you know, I think, so first of all, I wouldn’t worry about keeping up to date because That’s just not going to happen., you know, if you’re trying to keep up with the latest thing in everything, you will definitely fail. So, it’s not about knowing about the latest technology, it’s about going back to first principles, and it’s really about understanding how to technology is made and how to collaborate with technologies and how to essentially ask the right questions.

Because if a tech client expects you to know everything about technology, well. That’s wrong. That’s, that’s not going to, like, you’re a lawyer, that’s not what you’re hired to do. So, you need to understand how to ask the right questions. And because your job is to essentially protect them and to protect them from risk.

So, for example, um, you could say something like, tell me about your tech stack. Where do you think there are, are there any legal risks in your tech stack? Now, in order to ask that question. You need to understand what a tech stack is. Do you need to build it yourself? Absolutely not. Do you need to have a view on whether the tech stack is built well or correctly?

Absolutely not. You just need to know basically what it is. And then you ask the question that essentially, you’re being paid to ask, which is, tell me about the risks. Usually the person you’re speaking to is not necessarily going to know about the risks, but then they can say, Oh, you know what? That’s a good question.

I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll go and find out. So, with this, you’ve already delivered value. You’ve shown that you have basic knowledge and you’ve helped your client to basically go and help themselves. And so, what I do in my trainings and, you know, also through the Tech for Non-Techies podcast. So, I’d recommend that if people want to work with tech clients, if people want to work with a venture capitalist, listen to the Tech for Non-Techies podcast.

It is free and there are lots and lots of episodes with various different types of tech innovators and also lots and lots of episodes, essentially just explaining tech concepts. It’s kind of free education. But the first thing, the first mindset shift that I want people to make is that perfection versus iteration thing.

The next thing is to essentially ask the right questions. As a lawyer, you are not expected to know everything. But you are expected to ask the right questions, like tell me about your tech stack or tell me how you measure success. That’s another question that I’d really want lawyers to ask their clients.

And the way tech companies measure success is going to be different than the way a normal business measures success. Would you mind if I go into that to just give a practical example?

Bim Dave: Yeah, no, please do.

Sophia Matveeva: Well, I think the best example is social media. So, let’s pick, uh, let’s pick Instagram. Everybody knows what Instagram is. So, one of the metrics that Instagram measures is time in app. So literally how much time does an average user spend in the Instagram app every day? And like, if I said, okay, an average user spends one hour per day on Instagram.

Um, does that tell you anything about how much money Instagram is making? Exactly. So, you don’t know because time is not a measurement of money. So, businesses, you know, any kind of normal standard traditional business, they all measure financial metrics. So, profit and loss, margins, margin growth, and so on. Uh, but, uh, all of these metrics that lawyers are definitely going to know.

In the tech world, that’s one of the things they measure because at the end of the day, they do have to make money. But you only make money if your product is useful, if your product is loved by your users. And so first you have to measure product metrics and only if your product metrics are going in the right direction, will you make any money and you have to trans, you have to link product metrics to business metrics.

And so, for example, Instagram might have time and app and they, and they make a hell of a lot of money. We know that, you know, Mark Zuckerberg is a very rich man, but can you think of another company of another tech company where people come back and spend a lot of time on that site or on that app, but the company makes no money? Is that possible? So, I can think of two examples. So, Reddit just did an IPO and they still haven’t made a profit. So that’s, that’s one example. And Reddit is the third most visited site in the U S and. Wikipedia, Wikipedia is actually a charity, right? But when we’re researching something, we spend lots and lots of time in Wikipedia.

So, for you as a lawyer. Okay. I do not expect you to understand what a company’s product metric is, because actually it’s a really hard thing to work out. And a lot of the time, the tech innovators themselves, they’re not exactly sure what they should be measuring. So, figuring out what the product metric is, is really hard.

And so, when I am teaching in a corporate or where I’m teaching, or if I’m teaching in a business school or the law school, essentially, I want people to. Know how to ask the right questions and to understand the basic jargon. That doesn’t mean that you need to, that you’re going to learn everything about web three, because remember, web three was super fashionable a couple of years ago, and now nobody cares.

So, don’t worry about tech hype because hype, it’s like fashion. It comes and goes. Worry more about the fundamentals of how technology is made and how to collaborate with developers.

Bim Dave: Fantastic. Thank you. Thank you for that. Um, I just want to, I want to go back to something that you mentioned a little bit earlier about the concept of being a strategic advisor to a law firm, um, uh, to, to a law firm client in particular. Um, what is, what does that, what does that actually mean and why is it important to make that distinction between being a strategic advisor versus being an expert that’s delivering services to a client?

Sophia Matveeva: Well, I can, you know, I can speak from the point of view of a client, from my own experience and also from the experience of all of the, uh, tech innovators that I’ve worked with. So essentially when a law firm is working with a fellow lawyer, then that lawyer is going to understand how to instruct them.

Whereas if you’re actually working with the key decision maker, you know, the CEO or the venture capitalist, they don’t necessarily. know what they need. They don’t necessarily know what the problem is, and they also can’t necessarily foresee the legal issues that might arise. And so, I think that from some lawyers, there is this expectation that the client is going to say, Come and do this thing, like give me this kind of agreement.

This is what I need. And to us on the Technovator side, it’s a bit like going to a doctor and say, like, here are the instruments operate here, like operate on my leg. Whereas that’s not how you go to the doctor, right? You go to the doctor and you say, I don’t know, I’ve had this weird ache. I don’t understand.

Can you have a look? And then it’s up to the doctor to then, you know, do the test that they need to do and then prescribe you the correct course of treatment. And so that’s the way I think of as a strategic advisor, somebody who not only does the thing that you wanted them to do, which is, you know, the shareholders agreement or the licensing contract or whatever it is, but it can also ask you some of the right questions, like ask you about your tech stack and then from, from that, you realize, like, Oh my God, one of the tools that we’re using, actually, you know, they’re changing their license soon and we’re going to be at huge risk.

And if we don’t disclose that to our investors soon, you know, things are going to look really, really bad. And that’s strategic advice. So strategic advice is basically telling the decision maker something that They probably don’t know, or just asking that decision maker questions to make them think, Oh, well, thank you very much for highlighting something that otherwise without you, I wouldn’t have thought of.

And then that’s what makes you irreplaceable because, you know, especially now with, uh, so many contracts online with Chad GPT for kind of standard contract drafting, that’s going to become more and more of a commodity service. Whereas being able to foresee your client’s problems, that’s what makes you completely irreplaceable.

Bim Dave: Yeah, really, really good points. I think, um, if, if I could kind of kind of summarize my interpretation of that, it sounds like it’s really about how do you deliver value back to your client? And I think delivering, um, a service on demand. So, you know, I request. Um, some contract edits and you’re, it’s kind of very transactional in terms of being able to deliver that is one thing, but actually being, being, and, um, be there for your customer and actually listening and building that relationship and thinking about ways to deliver value back to that customer beyond what’s being asked for, asked for, I think is what, what a lot of clients are looking for these days, right.

Is being able to really have a trusted relationship. With their legal team, um, to be able to guide them on their journey, which can have, you know, lots of bumps along the way, um, particularly around, um, tech startups. Uh, uh, but, but yeah, I think that’s, that’s really what they’re looking for. That value proposition from, from the lawyer.

Sophia Matveeva: Exactly. And you know what you, I think from what lawyers have told me is that they. It’s much easier for them to be involved right at the start, as opposed to, Oh, we’re about to make this deal. Like, let’s imagine that there is a deal we’re about to make. I don’t know, one company is about to buy another. It is going to be, the lawyers are going to be able to give better advice and be more thoughtful and be more helpful if they are consulted when actually the deal is still basically just a thought. You know, when the founder is thinking, well, so, you know, we’ve tried to build this technology and actually it’s been really expensive and it’s been really difficult, but there is the startup that has this technology and we think that, you know, we could raise the money to do this transaction, that we could do, we could raise the money to make this acquisition.

We’re thinking of making this purchase. Do you have any advice? Do you have any thoughts on this? And essentially, if the lawyer is brought in at this very early stage, then maybe they can advise on negotiations. Maybe they can say, Oh, look, can you, you need to have a look at this company’s contract. If you, if you find that these companies? contracts are not structured properly, maybe you could actually get them at a better deal than what you might be thinking of offering, you know, save yourself a few million pounds.

So. That is a much, and also for lawyers, it’s far more interesting work, right? Like that’s actually like building, that’s building the economy. That’s building the modern economy. That’s far more interesting than being called in when essentially everything’s already been decided and then it’s just like, okay, well, we’re doing this thing.

Can you draft us the contract? That’s not interesting. That’s not particularly interesting work because that’s not really close to the decision-making table. And also, that’s very replaceable work, and that’s not really relationship work. Does that make sense?

Bim Dave: Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is a common, a common theme of conversations, um, at the moment with regard to, um, The role of technology in a law firm, right? And it’s very, very similar kind of conversations being had in terms of where should a lawyer be spending time. And actually, with all of the advancements in some of the large language models that are now out and doing some of that lower level, um, work, it does make a lot of sense for lawyers to really be thinking about how do they differentiate themselves from what can be automated to really delivering that high value work that you talk of.

Sophia Matveeva: Yeah, and you know, I actually think that when lawyers are thinking about, oh, how do we adjust to large language models today? And you know, they’re learning about technology and large language models for their work. I actually think it’s a kind of, um, two for one situation in terms of your education, in terms of the ROI that you would get.

Because what I want people to see is that when you’re learning about technology, yes, you?re learning to basically be more effective at your work, but also understanding all of this means that you could then work for a generative AI company as a client. So, don’t just think of like, okay, I need to understand what AI is to do my job better, you know, to use AI as well.

I could also be a strategic advisor to an AI client and that AI client might go on to become the next Facebook. Like, why not? Wouldn’t that be an interesting career journey? And so, you’re investing in two things. You’re investing in digital transformation. You’re investing in learning about digital transformation of your industry.

And you’re essentially learning a skill that’s going to help you work with basically some of the most lucrative clients in the world. Um, you know, I saw a statistic recently that said that the Fortune 500, And only 10 percent of the Fortune 500 are classified as tech clients, which I think is really interesting because I think it feels like tech is everywhere because these companies are so influential, but actually 90 percent of Fortune 500 clients, uh, Fortune 500 companies are not tech companies.

Which basically means that the opportunity is huge and we’re still at the beginning of this opportunity. So, if you, if you understand how to speak tech and speaking tech is not the same as doing tech, right? If you understand how to speak tech, you will be essentially able, your kind of buying yourself.

You’re giving, your skillset that is going to continue feeding you for years, if not decades.

Bim Dave: Yeah, absolutely. Great, great points. Um, I’m just interested to hear from you in terms of your interactions with some of the, the customers that you have, some of the law firms you’ve been interacting with, what do you see in terms of some of the shifts and trends that are happening within the legal sector at the moment?

Um, particularly, uh, obviously the, the big one is, um, how much press coverage AI and, and its impact on law firms, but do you see any other significant trends? Um, that are interesting for our audience to hear about.

Sophia Matveeva: Well, I think, you know, the, so obviously AI, yes. And as a result, what clients are asking about in terms of billable hours? No, I think, I think. People are wondering about what’s going to happen to the business model of law firms, because essentially the, the billable hours model is going to have to change as a result of these technological trends.

And this is, this is something that I think a lot of people are wondering about and some people are worried. So, some people are very excited, but that’s definitely one trend that I’m seeing. Another thing that I see is that, um, People get driven by hype and they assume that they need to understand the latest technology.

So, for example, I’ve had people, you know, I’ve, I’ve had requests for training on blockchain from people who do not understand anything about software. And I say, you know, this is, you don’t need to do this. If you don’t, if you don’t know anything about, you know, if you don’t even know what agile innovation is, or if you never heard of design thinking, we should not talk about blockchain.

Like that’s, if you want to talk about blockchain, you have to do the foundations. And I find that because, as you said, you know, there’s, there’s press about AI. And last year there was press about, you know, there was all this press about crypto and Web3 and blockchain. I’d like that. There’s a new thing basically every year, and I find that especially a lot of training departments, because they, you know, a lot of HR people, they themselves, they want to deliver a good training session, but they don’t necessarily know what their lawyers need.

The lawyers also don’t really know what they need because they’re lawyers. And so, you kind of have two non-tech people thinking, well, we need to learn something. And it seems that everybody is talking about. Blockchain or whatever the latest thing is, or do you remember 3d printing? So that’s the thing we need to dive into.

And what I would really encourage, you know, the, the buyers of training, whether it’s the partner who signs off the check or their HR person or the L and D person, I would really encourage people to differentiate between whatever the hype is basically, cause that’s PR and what’s actually making a business difference.

Because for example, there was so much press and there was so much hype with 3d printing. And actually, has it really changed manufacturing? Not really. Did it really translate to a lot of money? Like for some people, but not, not much, really. The same can be said of blockchain, but the same can be said of NFTs.

And so, don’t be driven by height, be driven by fundamentals.

Bim Dave: Yeah, I think that’s really good advice. Always go back to how does it impact the business model, um, that you’re trying to operate, right? Um, that’s what it comes down to.

Sophia Matveeva: Yeah, and also, I would just think that, you know, if it just, if it’s just the latest thing, um, if it’s the latest thing, it probably hasn’t yet had time to actually impact anything. And, you know, the final thing is Walk before you can run. You know, I’m not saying don’t learn about NFTs. If that’s, you know, especially if you’re working in the art market, that’s, if you’re, if you’re working with art clients, that’s something really useful to learn about, but NF and NFT is something that’s created by software.

So, if you don’t know anything about how software is made, then first learn what that is, because. And if the learning, what an NFT is state is stage two, learning the basic concepts of software and how software is made and learning to speak tech is stage one, and actually you can learn the core concepts of how to speak tech within a day.

So, you know, invest that day. And then, you know, if you desperately want to learn about blockchain, NFTs and whatever the latest thing is, then stage two is all yours.

Bim Dave: Yeah, absolutely. Really good. Thank you, Sophia. That was very good and really helpful advice. Um, I have a few wrap up questions if I may.

Sophia Matveeva: Of course.

Bim Dave: So, my, the first question that I love, um, hearing the response to from all of my previous audience, uh, previous guests are if you could borrow Dr. Who, Dr. Whose time machine and go back to yourself at 18 years old, what advice would you give yourself?

Sophia Matveeva: I mean, the first thing that came to mind was don’t wear that skirt. That’s, I mean, literally, that’s, that’s, or just, you know, definitely my sartorial choices were not optimal at the time. And, um, I would, I would say that, um, don?t worry, you’re going to be all right. That would be the advice. I think when I was 18, you know, I was very worried that I didn’t know exactly how everything was going to work.

And I think we have, you know, if you are used to getting good grades and you’re used to kind of doing quite well at school, then when you’re released into something that is less structured, it can feel very confusing. And I would just say, don’t worry, you’ll figure it out.

Bim Dave: Excellent, really good advice. And I think we can all relate to bad fashion decisions of the past. So, I’m with you on that one. Um, and then the next question is, Is there a favorite productivity hack that you use that you would, um, share with the audience at all?

Sophia Matveeva: Yes, and it is sleep, get some sleep, honestly, you know, and especially I’m saying this, lawyers, you’re, you’re burning the midnight oil. And I understand this. I used to work in a private equity firm. I literally had to sleep under my desk sometimes doing an all-nighter was a completely normal, you know, it’s like high finance.

So, I, I did that. And I don’t think it was. particularly productive because like, are you productive when you’re tired? I mean, sometimes, sometimes we just have to suck it up. Like, I totally understand that. Sometimes you just have this deadline and you know, it’s just a night of Red Bull and Haribo. We’ve all been there.

But do not make that a habit because honestly, if you, get a proper good night’s sleep, which means, you know, no caffeine after lunchtime, then essentially your brain is going to function better. So that’s my best productivity hack. And there is a book called why we sleep, which honestly just really changed how I think about things.

And that has changed how seriously I take sleep.

Bim Dave: That’s excellent. Really, really good advice. And I, I can relate to, I can relate to that somewhat. Um, for me, it’s more about, Food. So, I, I was in a habit of missing and skipping lunch pretty much every day. And I made, I made it a rule a couple of years ago. I think it was the, like, at least, at least for 30 minutes, I’m going to take time out to go and eat.

Um, and ever since doing that, everything changed because I’m so much more alert in the afternoon. My health is better as a result of it. And actually, you have much better ideas when you break away from the desk for a little while. So, it actually helps in a lot of ways.

Sophia Matveeva: Exactly. I know we’re so unfashionable, right? Like maybe, maybe lots of people say, Oh, here’s this tool or here’s this app. And I’m just saying, go to bed. And you’re saying, take a lunch break.

Bim Dave: Yes, exactly.

Sophia Matveeva: and cheaper, right? Yeah. It’s cheaper and it works.

Bim Dave: Exactly, yes. Sophia, thank you very much for your time today. It’s been really good. Um, some lots of nuggets of wisdom, uh, in, in what you shared today. So, I really do appreciate that. And before we wrap up any closing thoughts or advice that might be beneficial for our legal audience.

Sophia Matveeva: Well, so first of all, thank you so much for having me. So, I really, really do appreciate it. And, uh, I can just leave you with a really quick story, which I think is going to inspire you. So, there’s a lady that I interviewed on my podcast. Her name is Jennifer Byrne, and she used to be the chief technology officer of Microsoft in the U S.

So, a really big job. And she said that when she was first offered this job, she turned it down. And her, you know, her boss said, why are you turning it down? And she said, I don’t know enough about technology. I don’t know enough about the technology that Microsoft makes. To take this job, I’m not going to be good at it. And her boss said, nobody knows enough about the technology that Microsoft makes because it is just too much. No human brain can keep all of that in one break. It’s impossible. So, take the job. And you’ll figure it out. And that’s what she did. And so, she said, she spoke on the podcast episode, how she literally still took courses as the chief technology officer of Microsoft in the U S.

She was still taking courses. She was still learning. She was listening to podcasts. She was basically doing what the listeners are doing. So, if you’re freaked out by technology and you’re thinking I’ll never know enough, don?t worry, nobody can know enough. You’re going to be fine. Learn what you need to, and just put one foot in front of the other.

Bim Dave: Fantastic advice. Sophia, thank you again. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.

Sophia Matveeva: Thank you so much, Bim. I love that conversation.

Etiquetas: tech-savvy lawyer