Reinventing Legal: What You Need To Know About Being a Knowledge Management Leader

Welcome to LEGALTECH MATTERS, a Litera podcast dedicated to creating conversations about trends, technology, and innovation for modern law firms and companies big and small.

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Ari Kaplan

Welcome to Reinventing Legal. I am so fortunate today to be speaking with Philip Bryce, the global chief knowledge officer at Mayer Brown. Hi, Phil, how are you?

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Philip Bryce

I'm good, Ari, and it's nice to be here. I'm flattered that you want to talk to me, so thank you.

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Ari Kaplan

I always say I get to do lucky work. This is a great example of that. Can you tell us about your background and your role at Mayer Brown?

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Philip Bryce

I am a lawyer. When I practiced full time, I was a commercial litigator and I became one of the early full-time knowledge management lawyers in the U.S. starting in around 1999-2000 at Debevoise and Plimpton. I moved down to White and Case in about 2004 there for 11 years as a knowledge management lawyer. And seven years ago, I was recruited to lead the knowledge management function at Mayer Brown, where I'm currently the global chief knowledge officer.

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Ari Kaplan

You mentioned your career prior to knowledge management, so you clerked for a federal judge after graduating from law school and then practiced for several years before moving into practice support and knowledge management. What inspired that shift?

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Philip Bryce

Well, the truth is there's an intervening career. Actually, I come from a family of actors. My father was a soap opera leading man. Met my mother in the theater, and that was my career choice, My undergraduate degrees in theater. And I set out to be an actor. My family got in a little bit of economic pressure, and I was in a community theater production, great production of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night.

And I got the idea that I could get a job during the day and do theater at night and be happy and have and be able to be in a position to help my family. And I'd have this perfect work life balance. So, I decided in 5 minutes, one afternoon to go to law school and thought, well, of course I could be a lawyer.

I really didn't know much about it, and I did way better than I expected to in law school. Doors opened. I had a great year as a law clerk for a U.S. district court judge in Connecticut, got recruited by big firms. Wound up as an associate with what was then Bingham, Dana, and Gould in Boston. It became Bingham McCutchen working 60, 70 hours a week, scratching my head what happened to that other half. And around 1983 I quit, and I moved to New York and for almost 20 years I made most of my living as an actor doing various things. And I got I knew people at Debevoise and Plimpton and got work by the hour there starting in the late eighties doing what we now would call knowledge management, helping them to manage their collection of standard forms, writing summaries of legal research documents when the document management system arrived.

I just asked a lot of questions and figured out how to turn their hard copy loose leaf of standard forms into an icon on everyone's desktop. I started building practice intranet pages using Microsoft Front Page and doing current awareness, sending out emails about international arbitration based on developments. And that turned into when I was getting a little bit older.

I wanted to have a family, and my acting career had become about the money. I asked Debevoise if I could come and be a litigation lawyer an associate and the partner, thank goodness for him, John Curry said to me, well, we could do that, but we like what you do. Why don't you be our full-time knowledge management lawyer and you tell us what to do.

And so that's how my knowledge management career, very unexpectedly and very fortunately happened. And I've loved it. I've had a wonderful 23 years since then.

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Ari Kaplan

How has your acting career influenced the approach that you take to knowledge management?

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Philip Bryce

Some people say, Well, a lawyer and an actor, same thing. Although an actor wants to reveal even when they're being persuasive, and lawyers usually are hiding. You never, ever want people to see underneath. But the presentation skills I've been able to feel confident in front of groups and talking to partners. And, you know, in my acting career, I did a lot of corporate videos.

I worked with a lot of companies on training videos that help their employees or others understand things. And being a lawyer, I really understood what they were doing the business needs, and it helped me be more mature and business savvy in approaching my knowledge management career. And I've worked with such great law firms. I'm very grateful for the opportunities that I've had, and they've had a real education along the way.

I feel like I've gotten an education in law firm business management, just by observing and asking questions and being curious.

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Ari Kaplan

What were the early challenges in persuading law firm leaders to embrace knowledge management?

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Philip Bryce

The classic early days when law firms could just open their doors and work would come in and you could send out a bill of almost any size and it would be paid. And in those days, it was hard to sell knowledge management. Why should I pay knowledge management professionals to help me do the same work in less time and make less money?

It was sort of counterintuitive, of course, the wisest minds, I think even in the early part of this century saw the landscape more clearly, understanding that clients don't want you to be wasteful and you want your lawyers to feel supported and happy and not lost and not having to reinvent the wheel every day. So, we just had to, in the early days, ride the enthusiasm that we could find when the downturn hit in the first decade of the century.

The formula changed because fixed fees, caps, a lot of alternative fee arrangements started to bring into question how can we be profitable? And actually, had the experience of partners coming to me and saying, we need you in order to make money. You know, we're only going to get so much on this. How can we be more efficient and invest less time and make more money?

So, you just have to also always be willing to challenge yourself as a knowledge management professional to ask on behalf of your clients, the lawyers, what's in it for me? Why am I doing this and that? You have to be sensitive at every level of the organization, the partners who are thinking about the business. Bottom line, the associates who are more self-interested and some partners also every lawyer wants to go home earlier, wants to be more efficient and not have to struggle to get their work done.

So, you really have to think about meeting business needs.

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Ari Kaplan

So, was it the economics that was the catalyst for this transformed philosophy associated with knowledge management and innovation?

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Philip Bryce

Economics played a big role. We can't overlook the role of technology. When I was practicing law, my secretary had a typewriter. You couldn't go look for precedent documents in the document management system. As those advanced tools arrived, word processing document management systems, search engines. People realized, oh, there's a lot of ways to use this. There's a lot of power.

But they also realized that if you have a law firm with 700 lawyers, someone needs to help you think about how to organize, how to educate, how to deliver, how to separate, how to categorize. There was a natural need for professionals, and the smart law firms, I think, got on that boat early, and almost all law firms now have someone and there's been morphing to innovation, as we might talk about later.

But that technology played at least as big a role as economics.

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Ari Kaplan

You mentioned this expansion of roles. How do those who are in knowledge management data science and innovation align in law firms?

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Philip Bryce

We all have different skill sets and we all might have had different initial missions. So, for example, for knowledge managers at the beginning of this century, we all thought that we were solving the drafting problem, that that was knowledge management. I need to draft an inner creditor agreement. Where do I start where's a good starting point? We morphed and grew and adapted over the years as technology changed, as we understood better what the needs were, the business needs were to think about the business of law in addition to the practice of law, and to think about using tools and technology well, and then we started thinking about document automation and legal process improvement, and all of that heads right to the same target that innovators were leading toward. How do I take today's world of delivering legal services and think about all the levers that I now could change to make it better, to make it more streamlined, more high quality, more to the point, more intuitive, more enjoyable for lawyers and clients, and to delight clients.

So, we all have to head now toward the same target. And the challenge is to figure out how to blend our skills and not be parochial.

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Ari Kaplan

Have you found more success by driving new initiatives, or when you are actually responding to requests for new ways of working?

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Philip Bryce

That is such an interesting balance, and we all know the stories about Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted. They would have said a faster horse, not a car. I think we have to be ready to do both. We have to answer the question: What's in it for me? We have to recognize enthusiasm and ideas from practicing lawyers who say, can you do this for me?

But we also have to be willing to listen creatively and think proactively and toward the future and give people what they really want. They don't necessarily want this particular tool. There's the whole story about the hammer and the nail. I want to fill the hole. I don't want this particular tool. So as long as we can deliver in a way that makes sense to our customers, and ultimately our clients, then I think we have to look down the road.

But you can't say no to someone who has a good idea for an incremental change either.

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Ari Kaplan

Your career is so interesting for so many reasons, but you've spent much of it with just a few firms and for long periods of time. Is that a function of the time it takes to drive change?

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Philip Bryce

It's such an interesting question and how fortunate I've been. I spent a long time working with Debevoise and Plimpton and a lot of it by the hour as a consultant, but really 14 years, then 11 years with Brighton Case, seven years with Mayer Brown, how fortunate I've been. I like to think that because I have provided value and I've been willing to listen and adapt and keep my sponsors and my employer thinking that I'm worthwhile to have around.

But doesn't it take a long time to make really significant change? I've often thought about some of the hierarchies of knowledge management data, information, knowledge, wisdom, for example, and we really want to be working on knowledge, how to do something, wisdom, should I be doing it but most of the questions I get still today are about how can I get this data or how can I understand this information?

How many deals have we done that involve this particular type of clause in an agreement and what, you know, those kinds of things I think of as information. I would love to get to what I think of as zero, which is we have complete access to our data and our information, and now we can focus on knowledge. And wouldn't it be great if we could focus a year and a half ahead?

What are the legal issues that are going to be significant and how can our firm prepare for that? But we have been playing Catch-Up Ball for 23 years, not just me. Mayer Brown and these are great firms, and I'm course not denigrating any of the firms that are really good at what they do. We try to be really good at knowledge management, but it's hard to have complete control mastery over your data and information.

So, we have never gotten to that zero full access point yet. So that's good. I still have a job.

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Ari Kaplan

Well, given the complexity in this area, what skills are necessary ultimately to succeed in knowledge management?

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Philip Bryce

We talked about how knowledge management, innovation, data science, information architecture, all of these are converging. So, there are so many more ways one can approach things now. For me at the beginning, especially being a lawyer, was really helpful. Not all the successful knowledge management leaders and law firms in the world have been lawyers, but that's how I come at it.

And it's what I love. I love learning about the law and thinking about that. But there are other skills to being able to have vision. Where are we going? What challenges are we it really being able to define problems and communicate well about them? I think curiosity, to be able to look under the covers and try to ask the next three or four questions and not just take the first one.

For me, I'm not a technologist, but I did take a computer programming class in high school, and I was good at calculus. And so, I have that right brain left brain skill. And I like not only thinking about the high level, what do I want a tool to do? But I'm very willing to get under the covers and see how the levers and gears work.

That's very helpful. And then on the personal side, I think the real service mindset is critical. You have to be able to and you have to be tenacious and willing to take some heat. You have to have tact, empathy, diligence, persistence, and a lot of patience. All of that helps.

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Ari Kaplan

How important is it for the knowledge management team to interact with clients directly?

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Philip Bryce

It's really smart to do so. Not only because one can learn about client needs and maybe even help out clients, but it raises one's profile on the client side and also within law firms. My being able to speak to quite a few clients, try to be good at networking and meeting people and adding communication at that layer in the future, especially as we start to talk about morphing into innovation and really improve legal services delivery and the world is getting more complex with alternative legal service providers and the changes in practice rules in the U.S. that might change ownership.

All of those things have a big role to play. So, the most exciting legal process improvement projects, for example, are those that go across the boundary. We're going to do this and you, the client is going to do that. We're going to team up. It's way better to do that in the long run than to think about how can we deliver as a law firm, a product that we're just going to put over the transom to the client as a completed thing.

Being teammates in legal services delivery is much more exciting. That's a long-winded way of saying, yes, it's important.

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Ari Kaplan

Are there hurdles that firms need to overcome to give their knowledge management team access directly to their clients in order to implement certain changes or to drive new initiatives?

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Philip Bryce

I've been with such great law firms that have been open to having legal professionals be involved in client services delivery. There may be some firms in which it's thought, oh, we only want to have partners talking to clients and that I think is overly limiting in the sense of wanting to have absolute control over the communication can be a challenge.

Law firms are getting a lot better at that. Partners are really eager to have help. Certainly, at Mayer Brown, they're asking us to be more involved with client teams and client relationships. So hopefully those are if there are obstacles of perception and preference, they're going away.

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Ari Kaplan

This interview is a great example of the generosity, I think, of the knowledge management community. I have shared my research over the years with the knowledge management community. I have learned a tremendous amount. People are always willing to speak to me about trends and to inform me about different developments. Why is the KM community so tight knit and collaborative in that unique way?

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Philip Bryce

We have a lot in common in that those of us who first started leading KM did not expect to be doing so and weren't sure how to do so. I like to think that I actually played a role in the tenor, if you will, of the knowledge management community. When I was asked at Debevoise and Plimpton to be a knowledge management lawyer and tell the firm what to do, I went looking for people who could help me answer that question.

So, I networked a lot and in 2001 I invited a bunch of people I'd met over to lunch one day. That group has met every month since then. We at our first meeting decided to go around the room and there were maybe ten law firms at the table, and we decided to go around the room and just talk about how knowledge management ran at our law firm.

So, we got to the first law firm and spent the whole hour talking about that particular firm and the particular leaders' challenges. And that led us to say, well, let's keep going. And we really were frank with each other and had a sense of teamwork and confidentiality and we needed each other. I like to think that the atmosphere and the camaraderie that we established there spread as we invited more people than we had it well established.

So, there were other groups that formed in Toronto, in Washington, D.C., on the West Coast, and we started having an annual meeting in 2002 was the very first one. It was small couple of knowledge management leaders from London were over in New York for a legal tech conference, and we met. But those conferences happen every year and over the last few years, 100 people from around the world.

So, we've had conversations and we grew up together as knowledge management leaders sharing and pounding at the issues and addressing the conundrum to reach some shared opinions and conclusion knowledge management is about sharing. So that leads us just personally to be to want to collaborate.

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Ari Kaplan

You mentioned KM groups in different cities and in the UK, and I've been lucky on this program on Reinventing Legal and in my research to feature KM voices from around the world. It seems like knowledge management is a universal pursuit. Are there common challenges that most law firms face and are actually trying to overcome?

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Philip Bryce

100%. In the early years of our New York Knowledge Management Group, we identified that what we thought were the top 20 knowledge management challenges, how to help with the drafting problem how to help with understanding what local counsels should we engage in places where we don't have offices or skills, how to think about talking about email and how to use a document management system.

And I'm not thinking of necessarily the best examples, but we identify those challenges and we all had them, some of them we've been more successful at dealing with than others. But yes, there absolutely is commonality. All law firms need to and don't necessarily want to think partly of themselves as an assembly line and understand the work that they're doing.

We were manufacturing widgets. We would want to know how many red ones did we make, how many blue ones did we make, which of them are selling better, which of them are more profitable. We need to think that way about the work we do matter classification matter, profiling, experience management, I guess is what we would call it. Now, that's just an example of a very common challenge that law firms have.

So, I hope I'm answering your question. Well, 100% commonality certainly for law firms.

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Ari Kaplan

How did the pandemic change your mandate?

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Philip Bryce

It made everyone much more comfortable with working virtually using tools, processes, technology as enablers. It wasn't as easy to walk down the hall and ask someone for something. It was easier to go look for it in the Global Knowledge Bank. It might have increased usage. It certainly had a big impact on things like electronic signatures, virtual depositions, virtual closings, and it made people more comfortable with the notion that we could help them.

The fundamental challenges remain the same, but it was an accelerator of our status potentially within the firm.

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Ari Kaplan

How do you see the role of the knowledge management leader in a law firm evolving?

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Philip Bryce

We've talked about morphing and going across the client boundary and collaborating more, collaborating across teams, really thinking about process improvement, trying to get things down to their core and make them better and lean Six Sigma terminology to eliminate waste and friction. We all have to do that, so we have to be more teammate oriented and bring our skills to the table.

With a lot of other people to make a real difference. I do like the phrase which I believe is unattributed, that to go fast, go alone, to go far to go together. I think we have to be even better at that than we are. I think about the role of disintermediation in the law When I was practicing law, you couldn't know what the Supreme Court said about something unless you had access to a law library.

That was the way to get to what was. If you wanted to read Roe versus Wade, you had to go to the library and get it. That certainly has been totally changed so that anyone now can read Supreme Court opinions. Lawyers got paid a lot just to answer information questions. What is the law? We've been in somewhat of a wind tunnel that has been pulling away the unnecessary, the extra content and activities to try to get us down to what is the real value?

What is the core proposition that we offer? And that actually is better for law firms if we can embrace it. We at Mayer Brown, where leadership talks about providing premium clients with premium legal services and that is a win win for everyone. If clients feel like, yes, they might be paying a fair amount of money for something, but they're really happy.

They feel like they got that value and they're not paying for things that are extraneous. That's where we need to help our firm get. So, I don't know if I'm answering your question directly. We have to be business sensible and commercially thoughtful as we help our firms to marshal our resources collectively to deliver more innovative and efficient legal services.

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Ari Kaplan

This program is called Reinventing Legal. How do you see your work ultimately impacting that objective?

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Philip Bryce

Extending what we were just talking about. Now, anyone who's thoughtful at a law firm is reinventing legal every day. Client demands clients are getting smarter. The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium, Legal Operations Professionals are meeting. They're developing the collective voice that law firm knowledge management people have had for two decades now. It's going to be really powerful, and we have to listen.

Mayer Brown has been a sponsor at the last several corporate legal operations consortium global summits. We're really listening and paying attention. We have to be agile, adaptive, and willing to change and grow and more. So, I'm very eager to be part of a team that is willing to leave the past behind and try totally new ways of doing things.

Using our legal skills, I think knowledge management professionals have a perspective on the delivery of legal services as lawyers that is hard to get If you're a fee earning lawyer enmeshed in matters every day. We get to stand back and look at how do we do our M&A deals generally. How does the loan process work? How are we dealing with eDiscovery?

And that's not so much a knowledge management domain. We are great professionals in that world. But I'm just saying the overview perspective is something that is a luxury for lawyers who have to worry about billable hours. So hopefully we can bring that perspective to this process of thinking about reinventing how legal services are delivered.

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Ari Kaplan

I'm Ari Kaplan, and I've had the great honor of featuring Philip Bryce, the global chief knowledge officer at Mayer Brown for this episode of Reinventing Legal. Phil, thank you so very much.

Thank you for listening to LEGALTECH MATTERS. Be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.