TLH EP.42 The New Face of In-House Legal: Strategy, Growth & Human-Centered Delivery
Welcome back to The Legal Helm! In this episode, our host Bim Dave sets sail into the future of legal leadership with a guest who knows exactly how to navigate it – Sarah Clark, Chief Revenue Officer at The Legal Director. Sarah’s career spans over 20 years as both a barrister and general counsel, guiding fast-growth companies and embedding legal strategy directly into the heart of business success. At The Legal Director, she helps organizations scale smarter, delivering senior legal expertise without the overhead of a full-time hire.
This episode explores how Sarah and other forward-thinking leaders are reshaping the general counsel role, blending legal insight with business acumen to meet the challenges of today’s market.
So, grab your coffee and let’s dive in, you won’t want to miss this conversation!
Your Host
Bim Dave is Helm360’s Executive Vice President. With 20+ 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
Sarah Clark is a barrister and former-GC who has worked with fast-growth companies to embed legal thinking into their business from the inside out. With twenty years under her belt spanning private practice and in-house roles, she brings a no-nonsense, commercial approach to legal support. At The Legal Director, she helps companies get the strategic legal insight they need, without the overheads of a full-time legal hire.
Bim Dave: Hello everyone and welcome back to the Legal Helm where we navigate the currents of legal, innovation and leadership. And I’m your host, Bim Dave. Today I’m thrilled to be joined by Sarah Clarke, chief Revenue Officer at the Legal Director. Sarah is a barrister and former general counsel with two decades of experience across private practice and in-house roles.
She’s worked extensively with fast growth companies, embedding legal thinking directly into business strategy to support long-term growth and suc success. Uh, the legal director Sarah, helps organizations scale smartly, offering senior legal expertise without the overhead of full-time hire. In this episode, we’ll dive into how legal leaders like Sarah are reshaping the role of general counsel.
Sarah. Hello and welcome to the show.
Sarah Clark: Thank you very much for having me.
Bim Dave: So, Sarah, I thought it would be really good just to kind of learn a little bit about your career, cause it’s been very interesting in terms of how you got to the destination of your current role as CRO. So, it’d be great for you to kind of share that with us, with our audience.
Sarah Clark: Sure. Um, thank you for asking me. I, um, I started out actually as a criminal barrister, so that was my, my background. Um, and really the driver for that was, um, I. That whilst I enjoyed the challenge of being a lawyer, I really love working with people and I, um, needed something very purposeful in terms of my kind of career path.
So, it was the kind of human drama element, the persuasion, the advocacy that really drew me to the criminal bar. Twins came along later in my, um, in my career. And that’s just not really something that is, um, that’s consistent with, uh, the criminal bar because that is very much a vocation rather than a job. Um, and so I did quite a lot of naval gazing around, well, what do I do now? And, um, what am I good at and how do I use my skills to do something different? Um, and a very good friend of mine, uh, who’s actually chief Governance Officer now at the Premier League, um. I brought round a bottle of wine and said, “I’m gonna tell you all about your transferable skills that you don’t know you’ve got. and we kind of worked through them and I thought, oh, maybe there are other things that I could do. And I ended up, um, in-house for a while and I did a few really interesting in-house roles. I worked in software insurance publishing, which was, um. My kids’ favorite job that I’ve had because I work for JK Rowling’s, um, literary agency.
So, they said that I was Harry Potter’s lawyer. Um, so that was a highlight for them. and then, um, then I moved back into, uh, private practice for a little while and what I was doing was designing kind of. propositions for general counsel and um, kind of legal ecosystems where you might put, kind of breaking the model a bit, kind of thinking about putting together a, private practice firm, maybe a, maybe a boutique firm with a Magic circle firm and then a regional firm so that a GC has got a kind of whole ecosystem pulling in the same direction.
So. I’ve always been quite interested in breaking the model, um, and looking at delivery of legal services in different ways. and then I moved into the GC seat myself. So, I was a GC in two separate businesses. Uh, one, a small challenger bank, which was AIM listed, um, and. A very challenging role.
Did the whole kind of sole gc, um, lots of, um, exciting times there and then moved into a larger corporate, um, into a large motor insurer and sort of transformed the legal function there, um, helping them to kind of create a legal function that was fit for purpose for the corporation they were becoming. Um, so I really enjoyed that transformational piece and the personal aspects of it. And it was really that, that
Bim Dave:That.
Sarah Clark: Led me to think about what I wanted to do next, and the opportunity at the legal director came up to kind of help them build their strategy, put in place their kind of people strategy, transform the business model.
And it felt kind of serendipitous timing to bring my non-legal skills to bear in a, in a sector that I know very well. So that’s how I ended up here, um, and I’m really enjoying it and it’s never a dull moment.
Sarah Clark: Led me to think about what I wanted to do next, and the opportunity at the legal director came up to kind of help them build their strategy, put in place their kind of people strategy, transform the business model.
Bim Dave: Yeah, that’s a really interesting journey. And now I’m gonna be telling my 8-year-old that I met Harry Potter’s lawyer, so I’m very excited about that. So, so you, your role, right now at, the, the legal director is as Chief Revenue Officer. What does, what does that mean? Uh, what does that look like from a day-to-day perspective in terms of what you do?
Sarah Clark: Well, it looks like, uh, I helped them to build the strategy for us to kind of grow and we’ve got some really ambitious growth plans. And then, um, I think our founder thought, well, since she’s, um, helped us build the strategy, she can own the revenue number that she’s kind of told us we can achieve. Um, and so now I own the sales marketing client relationship management function. Um, and we’re kind of. Rebuilding that, that function, um, to, for the business that we are becoming because we are in growth mode, which is very exciting. Um, we’re, we’re putting in place a really ambitious strategy. We’re doing things differently. We’re packaging up our services differently. We’re getting much clearer about who’s our target audience, who’s our buyer, what are they buying? so yeah, a big, uh. Big period of, um, of change at the legal director, which is something I really relish.
Bim Dave: Yeah, it sounds like an exciting time. So as and as you’re building out your business model and, and your go-to market strategy, can you kind of give us a sense as to how the model differs from traditional legal services and how does it benefit clients in particular?
Sarah Clark: Yeah, sure. So, um. The legal director is a law firm, so we’re SRA regulated. Um, but the way that we are built is that we have 52. Self-employed GCs who work exclusively through us work on a fractional basis. So, any one of our lawyers might service two, three more clients and work with them on a, or several days a month.
So, so what that means is that they, they are career in houses. They are what I, what I like to call businessperson first, lawyer second, which is a very
Bim Dave: Very different,
Sarah Clark: uh, best to a private practice lawyer in my opinion. Um, and it
Bim Dave: and
Sarah Clark: they can really get under the bonnet of the business that they’re working in and they work as a kind of embedded member of that business’s leadership team.
So, they would attend board meetings, they would understand the strategy, they would help them spot legal risk horizon scan. It’s a very
Bim Dave: very different.
Sarah Clark: model to, um, you know, transactional lawyering by buying legal services through a law firm.
Bim Dave: Hmm. Yeah, indeed. And are there other benefits in terms of expertise? So, say for example, like, I’m a, I’m a software company for example. Um, what, what additional value do you guys bring to the table from that perspective in terms of experience on, on how, um, the challenges of running a software business in today’s age might come to come to the table?
Sarah Clark: Yeah, it’s a great question because obviously every client is so different and because we have this great portfolio of 52 and growing, um, GCs who’ve. All worked in different sectors. They come from, you know, obviously they started out in private practice, so they had different specialisms, and they’ve worked in different stages of business, different sizes of business.
And so, one of the important things we do at the point at which we, um, we start talking to a prospective client is really match them with the right. Person for the kind of key delivery of their work. And it would be somebody who, so for example, to use your, to use your tech business example, you’d be looking for somebody who had that very, um, specific expertise of having scaled the tech business and, and, and kind of gone through that journey so they could bring that to bear within the business that they go into. But that said. The benefit of us having 52 GCs with all of that different experience is that if something crops up in the course of that engagement that, that, that GC hasn’t come across before, they’ve got 51 colleagues in a team and we do, we do call it the team and they behave very much as a team where people can kind of parachute in and pick up, you know, bits of, um. You know, the delivery service for their colleagues and, and they can sort of, um, phone a friend and, and, and pick each other’s brains. So, I think that’s a really unique thing that we’ve got within the cohort of GCs.
Bim Dave: Yeah. No, that is interesting. So, you, you, you’re able to leverage that kind of network of experience effectively. Are, are there, are there things that you are doing? So, so as part of kind of your growth ambitions that, that you kind of talked of and, and the strategy that you’re taking, are there things that, that you are doing in terms of key initiatives that you would say help to drive some of that, um, that kind of cohesiveness between.
The lawyers that might be required to kind of like talk to one another in some of these circumstances. Like, I’m really interested to hear some of the key initiatives that you see as, as some of those growth drivers.
Sarah Clark: Yeah. Um, it’s a great question. One of the things that we’re very focused on, because obviously TLD has grown from a much smaller cohort of lawyers, um, to a much bigger one, and we’ll continue to do so. And so what we’ve been focusing on is what are the great things about the team that we want to kind of bottle and make sure that we can maintain them as we get bigger. Um, and one of those things is the communication between the team, the kind of social and the fact that they all know each other, they know each other’s kind of background, who they are, who you’d go to, to pick their brains on a particular thing. Um, we’ve got various communication channels where they obviously leveraging technology.
We’ve got teams, WhatsApp, all the different kinds of, um, mechanisms. That is so that they can pick each other’s brain and work together on different projects. Um, we have, last year we took on a head of technology who’s been building our own, um, proprietary platform called my TLD, the aim of, which is to. Make, um, make the lawyers’ lives better, their working lives better, make sure they’ve got access to everything they need from a kind of financial revenue projection point of view, to be able to know each other better so that we, we’ve created a, um, a mechanism for them to search by skills and sector expertise.
So that exactly that you can, you can go and say, oh, I’ve got an issue with, you know, a tech scales up and we are thinking about. Series B funding. And who can I ask about that? What, whatever it may be. Um, we are creating the tech mechanisms to enable them to do that easily, um, without having to drop a, you know, note on the WhatsApp group.
Has anyone done this? You know, it’s, we’re creating that, that capability, which is great. We’ve also got, um, different kinds of steering groups on different. Things. So, on the use of AI within business, on technology, on how we leverage my TLD platform, we’ve got small groups of the lawyers who all want to be involved in different parts of it.
So, it’s kind of making them part of the change journey and, and for them to be able to drive what’s useful for them to be able to deliver the best service to clients.
Bim Dave: No, that’s, that’s good to hear. And, and when you, when you think about, um, service delivery in particular, and I think you talked about some of the things that you are looking at in terms of, uh, maybe packaged services or what, what services you offer, how, what are you doing to ensure that the services you offer align with.
Some of the needs of the businesses that you are representing. Right. Um, because I’m thinking about, again, like thinking about some of this, the, the, the companies that are out there today that probably in like fast growth, um, areas, going back to the kind of technology sector in particular, um, there’s a lot of companies that grow very rapidly because of the ability to leverage technology, et cetera, to be able to move quickly.
Um, so, you know, what are you thinking about from that perspective and how do your services align with that?
Sarah Clark: Um, so the first thing we did was kind of zoom out and get very clear about. What are we selling and who are we selling it to? And so, the kind of, um, the piece that you’ve just described is our sale, um, is our scale, um, value proposition. So, it’s looking specifically at fast growth businesses. Um, and we’ve got lots of lawyers who’ve worked in fast growth businesses, including me. Um, so kind of getting together, putting our heads together, brainstorming, well, what are these companies facing into? What are the common pain points? Um, there’s a lot. When it comes to this offering where kind of call it the, dunno what you don’t know if you are buying legal services. You don’t know,
Bim Dave: Know.
Sarah Clark: um, what you are kind of insulating yourself against a lot of these.
Um, if you haven’t worked with a GC before, you might not know that it’s an option. You might not know what you are getting if you buy a gc. And it’s actually
Bim Dave: It’s actually quite
Sarah Clark: that value proposition because. It’s the stuff that’s been learned on the job, which is why I
Bim Dave: hard.
Sarah Clark: business person first, lawyer second.
It’s the, it’s the kind of lawyering that you can only learn from within a business. It’s helping the, it’s helping the management team to spot the risks coming over the horizon. It’s understanding, um, the kinds of things that would erode enterprise value. The kind of things that would. Create issues for you.
If you were looking for an X round of funding, for example, what, what’s going to make your life harder? It’s where, where are the, where you’ve grown very quickly. Where are the skeletons in the closets that are going to cause you pain further down the line when you’re
Bim Dave: Language, so
Sarah Clark: as a management team on moving forward, you’re not thinking about that tidy up exercise behind yourself to make sure that you are. In a great position for achieving, you know, um, obtaining
Bim Dave: funding.
Sarah Clark: an exit or whatever it may be. So we, we talk quite a lot about getting your house in order, um, kind of having, having an eye six months or a year in advance and thinking, look, if you’re gonna be looking for funding, what are the things that are really gonna cause you pain at that point in the future?
Because. If you bring us in, you don’t have to think about them. We’ll worry about that for you. And we’ve kind of been there, seen it, done it. So, um, yeah, that’s a great example, that scale, um, area, because there’s a huge amount of activity going on at pace and thinking about legal risk is not really, um, necessarily something that founders have got their eye on.
Bim Dave: Yeah, no, it’s very true. I mean, I’ve, I’ve spoken to a few startups over the years, and it’s quite interesting. Technology startups in particular are so focused on the product that they are building that they kind of forget about all the rest of it. So, they think that it’s as simple as. I download a couple of templates off the internet and I’m good.
I’m good to go. I can sell my product. Right. And there’s, there’s a whole different dimension to what you are then exposed to, especially once the success comes. And I’m sure, um, you know, that that’s really where you guys can bring something to the table, that that changes that dynamic. Yeah. Right.
Sarah Clark: a problem until it is one. Um. And it’s very easy to kind of do it and then move on to the next thing. But obviously if you’ve got somebody kind of in your corner, and the nice thing about having someone on a fractional basis is you have the ultimate flexibility of only buying however much you need of them, whether that’s to deliver a project.
So in within the kind of scale vertical that I was just talking about, um. You can buy, you know, you
Bim Dave: You can buy fraction.
Sarah Clark: On a day rate. So you could say, well, we need someone about two days a month and that’s what we need. And then it keeps us ticking over. Or you could buy a kind of productized scale package, for example, that puts in place that governance, those frameworks, um, all of that,
Bim Dave: That.
Sarah Clark: contract guardrails and the processes to make sure that all of that good stuff is happening in the background as you scale.
And then what it might mean is that you can actually hire. Your, your kind of legal resource having built that framework, and maybe it’s a much more junior resource than you would otherwise have been able to hire because the kind of, um, the build of the, of the legal framework has been done by someone with, a bit of gray hair and very broad shoulders.
Bim Dave: Yeah. Yeah. And, and so you, you kind of got the framework built out and the experience, the experience built into it. So, then it’s really just business as usual at that point. So yeah. To totally, totally get it. Um, so are you able to share how your team. Leverages maybe some of the data that you acquire through having the experience across all of these different customer types that you have.
How are you leveraging that insight, client insight to then further refine services or bring new service offerings to, um, to, to the market? And I guess that also plays a role in terms of client satisfaction as well, and, and how you might be leveraging some of that client insight to feed, feed into that.
Sarah Clark: Yep. It’s a great question and it is kind of hot off the press. So obviously I took this role in January and one of the things that we’re doing is redesigning client relationship management and looking exa. I mean, my. My, uh, tagline for the last year has been data, data, data, data. Um, so we’ve put in place that kind of data capture mechanism now to make sure that we can refine things as we go, that we’re capturing the right feedback, um, and we are now putting in place a much more, um. A much more detailed and thought-through client relationship management structure so that we are gathering that feedback and refining products as we go be before now. Um, our services hadn’t been packaged in that way. We had operated much more on a retainer basis, which we still do, it’s quite hard to capture.
About feedback and refine when obviously the delivery is much more sort of broad ranging. And so we’re, we’ve created the data capture mechanism now to get much clearer on what individual service lines the lawyers are offering within each engagement. So, what I would say and answer that question is ask me in six months time,
Bim Dave: We’ll have to get you back on the show for that. Do an do an update show. Um, no, that’s, that’s, that’s good to hear. I think, I think you’re right. I think there’s so many. There’s so many opportunities to improve client service through asking the right questions. Right. And at the point of delivery, that’s where we learn so much.
So, um, so good, good to hear that that’s part of your, your game plan.
Sarah Clark: Yeah.
Bim Dave: Um, yeah.
Sarah Clark: about that story as well just is, um, think I said earlier, under the bonnet of the business. I think. The work you do at the very beginning of the engagement. Um, and it’s not always easy because maybe the management team think of lawyers as transactional lawyers. Maybe they have, maybe they think of law as a kind of a distressed purchase.
And actually what they’re really thinking about is we’ve got this big dispute, or we’ve got this one thing that we are really worried about and, and they’re not thinking, look, if we let this GC really get under the bonnet of the business, they’re gonna be able to save us a fortune in the long run.
They’re gonna be able to refine. what the delivery of this legal target operating model for the long term looks like. Um, and so sometimes it’s quite difficult to get access to that management team to get under the bonnet. But what I would say is, if you can and if, um, if you can help to articulate the value in being able to do that, that’s where you can drive as a GC value for the client by deeply understanding the business from the outset and then tailoring the way you run legal strategy. You know, hanging off the business strategy in their own commercial ambitions. Um, and I, I think there is the big differentiator between what we do and sort of transactional private practice lawyering.
Bim Dave: Makes total sense. And just, just kind of moving on a little bit to the, to the client side. Um, I’d love to hear from you in terms of your experience over the years, how have you seen client expectations change with regard to. A, I think a, in terms of like the expectation of delivery of, of legal services, um, and then the whole kind of technology piece as well kind of falls into that and maybe then pricing.
Right. Um, so you kind of explained what, what your, um, pricing model is, but how does that play out with all of the stuff that’s happening in the technology space as well, which in, in essence can bring more efficiency in terms of legal service delivery. What, what are you seeing in terms of the key trends there?
Sarah Clark: Yeah, I think, um, it’s much more of a buyer’s market than it’s ever been in terms of, uh. Procuring legal services. I think there’s such a plethora of different ways that you can now buy legal services. we were, uh, TL D’s 15 years old, so we were sort of quite a, um. Quite a kind of disruptor and very different from what was on the market 15 years ago.
But obviously fractional is now a buzzword. You know, people are delivering fractional market, fractional marketing, fractional CFO. Um, you’ve obviously got, you know, the first ever AI law firms just been approved by the SRA. Um, you’ve got all of these different kind of legal tech solutions, and so I think there’s quite a. There’s quite a lot of noise in the marketplace, and I think it’s quite difficult for buyers to know what to buy, and that’s why I think the most important, one of the most important things we’ve been doing since I took on this role is just being really clear about our differentiators and really clear about our value proposition, because for the most part, in our very core. Deliverables in, in delivering the services of a fractional gc. We are not in competition with the tech companies. We’re not in competition with legal tech. you’ve delivered, you know, the framework or kind of got under the bonnet of the business, that’s
That’s where we with and collaborate with. Different providers, whether it’s legal tech, whether it’s flexible, junior resource or whatever it may be, to deliver the kind of optimized solution for the client. And that’s
That’s something said all we said looking not. You know, to go in and be the fractional GC for a client forever. We want to come in and deliver the most valuable service we can. And as soon as that becomes, actually, do you know what? You can do this via tech, or we could get a more junior resource in to deliver some of this. We do; we do exactly that. But you need to get in and see the big picture and kind of carve out what
Carving out lanes of work are before you can, before you can actually advise on is the right solution.
And I think, you know, having been a GC myself and bought Legal tech, um, I think one of the. Biggest mistakes that, uh, is made in the market is thinking you can solve your problems through tech without spending the time to really work out what those problems are first. And I think a big part of what we do is that, that scoping and understanding and mapping it all out, and then that’s how we bring, bring value to the clients by collaborating with all kinds of different partners in the space.
And that’s where it gets exciting because the space is absolutely huge now, and the, and the choices is, um, vast.
Bim Dave: Yeah. It, it really is. So, so do, do you see this causing some challenge in terms of how, how pricing models work in the, in the legal sector going forward? Because one of the things that I’ve, we’ve heard a lot about of, of, of recent times is clients putting further pressure on law firms generally to say, we, we, we almost want you to use AI to make yourselves more efficient and then price accordingly.
So rather than charging me by the hour. Maybe you charge me for the technology that you’re using because it’s unique to you and you’ve trained it. Maybe you’ve built the technology in-house, but, um, but, but, and, and then maybe there’s an offset there where the billable hour goes to, to like, um, uh, a crazy number in future.
But do you, do you see any of that kind of thing happening in terms of, uh, changing the way your service model is, is priced in future with, with the introduction of, of some of these solutions that maybe speed up, um, some of the way you deliver.
Sarah Clark:Yes, yes
Bim Dave: Yes.
Sarah Clark: So, yes, because marketplace is very diversified and it, Therefore there is more pressure from the buyer in terms of cost because there’s so many different cheaper options out there. not always the right option, and certainly we’re in a, in a different space in as much as. When you’re buying a fractional
Bim Dave: a,
Sarah Clark: you are buying a very senior experienced business lawyer, and I think that’s where
Bim Dave: that’s where it.
Sarah Clark: that we articulate the value proposition, because churning out NDAs and reviewing low level contracts is not where you get value from TLD US coming in and getting under the bonnet and saying, right, okay, well, you know, 30% of the delivery of this legal function is low level. know, churn and it’s, um, you know, low risk contracts. Here’s a solution for that. That’s where we
Bim Dave: of that.
Sarah Clark: but us actually doing that delivery it, it doesn’t represent good value anyway. So, I think we’re lucky from that perspective, I think it’s really important that we as a business, but also the individual GCs, the technology keep. A pace with the AI market in legal and, and one of the things
Bim Dave: One of the things.
Sarah Clark: a rolling program of different legal tech demos every month to make sure the lawyers are up to speed with what is on offer, who we can collaborate with, who we can partner with for the delivery of these things. Because otherwise, I think we would be wrong for us to say we can deliver maximum value to clients if we are not in a position to be able to say, do you know what this. This 50% here, or this 30% here could be done in this much, much cheaper way, and we’re gonna help you set that up. So we are lucky that we, you know, seriously, high quality strategic general counsel cannot at the moment be replaced by ai.
So, few we’re. We’re lucky to be in that position, but it is really important that we understand where business needs can be taken care of by technology, and make sure that we’re pointing clients at at the right solutions.
Bim Dave: Yeah, no. So on the solution side, you mentioned, um, what I think is quite a common problem with technology adoption, which is that sometimes, you know, what we’re sold in terms of a technology solution doesn’t solve all of the problems or I. We don’t anticipate some of the, the gotchas of, of implementing new technology and what that actually means.
Um, from like a change perspective, I’d love to hear your view in terms of some of the lessons that you’ve learned from maybe some of those bad experiences, right, that you might be able to share with the audience.
Sarah Clark: Yeah, I mean, I’ve, I’ve, um. I’ve worked with a lot of GCs and participated in quite a lot of round tables, um, where people shared a lot of horror stories about implementation, about, you know, how they wish they’d done it differently. Um, I have worked on the basis that you kind of try and keep it as simple as possible, make sure you, you’re solving the problems before you bring the tech in.
So, I think I’ve started each of my kind of transformation exercises with a. Lowest possible tech solution to make sure that you really understand what you’re capturing. You kind of spend the time getting it right. Well, what do we wanna measure and what is the, you know, how do we achieve that metric or that data, um, that dataset.
Um, so I haven’t
Bim Dave: I have.
Sarah Clark: got horror stories, um, but. I know within our cohort we’ve got, um, GCs who’ve, uh, worked with huge corporates and have kind of been there, seen it, done it with all of that, and we talk a lot about that kind of thing. And one of our verticals of delivery is legal optimization. And so, um, work very closely with Kerry Philip, who’s a ex Vodafone gc, and she. She kind of goes in, quite often into businesses as part of her TLD engagements and picks up the pieces where tech has been, you know, badly implemented or implemented too soon. Um, and yeah, that’s, that’s something that, that she talks about a, an awful lot.
Bim Dave: Uh, good. Good. Uh, I think they’re all, all good lessons, uh, learned in terms of what, what to do, but I like, I like the idea of like defining the problem at, at the beginning, right. And figuring out how you, how you, how you define that without the technology piece to begin with. Because I think that that is a big I.
Sarah Clark: way.
Bim Dave: It’s, it’s a, it’s a big miss on, on on a lot of occasions. So, so good to hear that you have that approach. So, so, um, I think I, I read on the web, on your website somewhere that, that you kind of have a people first approach or a very fo a big focus on the human element, which kind of translates to what you were just talking about in terms of, um, what value you, you bring to, um, to your clients, um, and the organizations that you work with.
How. Are you, are you, and we kind of touched a little bit on ai. I am just interested to get your take on how does that play out in future in terms of balancing the people first approach with maybe some of the tooling technology that kind of replaces some of that lower level stuff, but the lower level stuff being really a, a breeding ground maybe for, um, new talent coming into, um, an a a law firm.
Right. Um, so some of the, some of the things that I’ve heard from. Various law firms is that we used to have like this big cohort of, of, um, people that are just qualified, uh, coming into the business and then learning through some of the lower level elements of, of what we do. Um, some of the basic contract review and all of those kind of pieces so that they’re, they’re learning on the job, right?
They’re, they’re figuring out how to, how to apply some of those principles. How does that change in future with, with some of that stuff being outsourced to, to ai.
Sarah Clark: Yeah. Uh, uh, it, it is a real concern I think, in terms of future talent coming through. Um, coming through. I, it, it’s not something that we encounter so much in TLD because all of our resource is of a certain level. We’re all kind of 20 years plus qualified GCs. Obviously, we work with a bench of. and flexible resource, depending on the engagement in the way that I described.
So if it’s right, you know, you kind of get it, come in, you understand the landscape and you say, right, well, I can see straight away that this is not a good use of my experience and resource and frankly the, the client’s money. And so, we’re gonna resource it this way. So, we do, we do work with. Um, juniors coming through from that point of view, but we don’t have any in-house trainees or any in-house paralegals at the moment, but it is something that I’m concerned about and certainly I talk to. Um, I’m, I was on the O list, uh, through the OSHA lawyer, so I’ve talked to their paralegals and trainees and apprentices. Um, and it’s something that I think is, is really noticeable. You know, everybody’s at home. Um, the delivery and the kind of learning on the job. You know, paginating, the kind of low level work where you cut your teeth, just isn’t available anymore because it is absolutely, um, resourced by tech. So, I think it’s incumbent on us as more senior lawyers to think about. When we’re working with junior people, how can I best support them? How can I best help ’em understand the value that they’re delivering to the client? Because let’s be honest, you know, paginating a bundle never taught you anything other than, you know, work hard so you don’t have to do this anymore. Um, and so it’s good that tech can take care of those kind of level routine jobs. So, I think it’s important that we. the junior people, help them understand where they really can add value, but then make sure that we’re really nurturing them and teaching them the skills. Um, because yeah, I, I really worry about the talent coming through and what that means for them.
So, I think it’s important that we really focus on where all of us add value and where tech, you know, can, can take care of the, of the churn.
Bim Dave: Absolutely. Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see how it all unfolds, um, over the coming years, um, if not months, right? Because I think it’s moving very quickly. Yeah.
Sarah Clark: or it’s, it’s happening
Bim Dave: Yes, yes,
Sarah Clark: up, isn’t it?
Bim Dave: indeed, indeed. So, so looking ahead, Sarah, um, what do you see as kind of the future for the legal services sector over the next few years?
How, how, how does it look?
Sarah Clark: I think it’s really exciting. Um, sort of sitting in my
Bim Dave: Nice.
Sarah Clark: Um, I. There’s the potential to feel, you know, quite anxious because there’s so much competition out there. market is diversifying at a rapid rate. It’s a buyer’s market. The buyer has got so much choice, but I do think that gives us an opportunity at TLD to really differentiate ourselves and to really lean into that really
Bim Dave: That really hard one.
Sarah Clark: Experience of being business people first, lawyer second. Um, and really carving that out and making sure that businesses understand the value that that brings. Um, yeah, because I think things are moving incredibly fast and I think that, um, we absolutely have to keep up. Otherwise, you know, we we’re gonna be, we’re gonna be extinct.
And I, you know, I say that. As, as
Bim Dave: As.
Sarah Clark: lawyers, I think, um, there are a lot of things that we bring to the table, the senior GCs in part/icular that cannot be replaced by technology. And so the only way to survive, I think, in this market is to be really clear about what those things are and, and lean into those and make sure that the market understands they are.
Bim Dave: And, and if you could implement one change to how the legal industry approaches client engagement and some of the service delivery, um, pieces of the puzzle, what, what would that be?
Sarah Clark: Um, coming from the perspective of someone who has been a buyer of legal services and my bug bear has always been, um, experience is that. Law firms, and I say that, you know, we’re a law firm, so, so it’s, we have the same challenge. I think it’s absolutely essential that at the beginning of an engagement or even during the kind of prospecting stage, they take the time to deeply understand the client’s business. Um, not just a number, not just flash PowerPoints, but really, really understanding a client’s business because that’s
Bim Dave: That.
Sarah Clark: then add value. And having been a gc, the, the difference between the law firms that took the time to really understand my pain points and what the business that I was,
Bim Dave: Management
Sarah Clark: management team that I was reporting into what they
Bim Dave: are.
Sarah Clark: to achieve and therefore, what kind of cascaded down to me in terms of objectives. The difference that can be made by really taking the time to understand that having those deep client conversations is, is absolutely vast. Because if the law firms speak the language of the GC and speak the language of the C-suite and, and tie in what they’re trying to deliver with those objectives, it is absolutely game changing for, for the buyer, for the gc.
Bim Dave: Agreed. Agreed. Excellent. Thank you Sarah. Um, so just in, I just have a couple of uh, wrap up questions if I may. Um, the first of which being, if you could borrow Doctor who’s time machine and go back to yourself at 18 years old, what advice would you give yourself?
Sarah Clark: Um, oh, it’s very cliched, but probably believe in yourself. Um, I, I, um. I’m a late diagnosed A DHD, um, and I always knew that I had quite a creative problem solving brain. I just didn’t know why. And I feel like if I had just lent into those sort of strengths and really believed my own hype, I think I would’ve, um, had much more success, much more quickly.
Bim Dave: That’s, that’s, that’s really good advice actually. And, and I’ve heard that a lot, um, that A DHD actually can become your superpower, right? When you know how to, how to kind of hone, hone in on it. So, yeah,
Sarah Clark: wish it hadn’t taken me 40 something years.
Bim Dave: sorry. You got, you’ve got there in the end. It’s fine.
Sarah Clark: Exactly.
Bim Dave: yes. Um, uh, favorite holiday destination?
Sarah Clark: Oh, that is a great question. Um, probably Guatemala, where I traveled when I was, uh, about 22. It was just the most vibrant, colorful, friendly. Crazy place to be and I enjoyed it. Loads.
Bim Dave: Excellent. I don’t think we’ve had that one before. So that’s, that’s a good, a good, good one to add to the bucket list for sure. Um, and then fi, final question, which I have to ask now. A favorite Harry Potter book
Sarah Clark: Oh,
Bim Dave: I.
Sarah Clark: that is the really tough one. Um, and I would cause a, uh, a war between my children on this one. Um, I think I. Oh, which, you know what? I think number one, I think number one, because of all of the, just the magic and the novelty in it, and the kind of fresh-faced, big eyed children at Hogwarts, I think it’s just, it was just such a, was so special that first film.
Bim Dave: I think I’m, I’m with you on that one. You heard it here first kids, right? It’s, it’s number one. Thank you very much, Sarah, for joining us today. We’ve learned a lot, um, about your business and, and really looking forward to seeing how that evolves over time. But thank you for your time today.
Sarah Clark: Thank you. It’s been great to be here. Thanks for having me.