 take it away. I would say really quickly we're thrilled to have Raj Goyal and Ari Shidati here today to speak to us about one of my favorite topics which is how in some ways the law profession has been among the slowest to embrace technology and the power, disruptive power of technology is finally coming to bear on this profession that's been the same for quite some time. Raj started up called Vodala a previous career in the Kansas House of Representatives among many other things. Ari now at Buzzfeed to HLS grads who I think can introduce themselves maybe talk a little bit of who they are and how they got to do what they do. They'll speak for a while, we'll have plenty of time for questions and discussion. We'll keep it going till 1 or 1.15 or so whenever people want to wrap it up and without further ado I'm gonna turn it over to you guys. Thank you so much for being here. Great. That's great. I'll start. Please. All right well afternoon my name is Raj and this is my sidekick Ari and I'm like his intern and so this is the first of our road shows. I'm the court jester. Yeah it's the first of our road shows we hope many more but we really want to shout out to Chris. Thank you. You know he got an email I think through Dean Minow or that we were emailing and connecting and it's pretty remarkable that in you know few weeks you guys move fast and quick and set this up so we really appreciate it. Dan thanks for the logistical help in the back and more importantly thanks to all of you we were joking on the cab ride over like we assumed it would just be us and we can talk to each other. Yeah yeah we do we are good friends so that is useful and I've made mention before the puff pastries I think are the real reason you're here I mean you know I tried at Logan to get one munchkin at the ubiquitous Dunkin Donuts they won't do that anymore so even if you try to offer up a quarter over they try to sell them 10 at once so we'll have to disrupt that model at some point but we really are excited to do this and I think as Chris mentioned we'll I'll give you a little bit background on me and sort of and then run through sort of my let's say kind of stump speech here Ari has some incredibly insightful views on the political situation in our country which I think all of us probably have views on but I spent a fair amount of my career in the political system still very involved in that so I will be inevitably like a tractor beam drawn into that discussion but I also want to make sure that as Chris mentioned we get on the table the topic of why you're here and the ideas that you know that we raised in the description of this event so we were talking where I'm from the Midwest I'm from a state called Kansas you fly over it on your way to Napa or or wherever we go I and my parents are doctors from India they kind of came over if you if you know there's a fair amount of Indian American physicians and any small town mid-large town whatever so I was raised there I ended up going to Duke for college and if you haven't noticed where we were pre-season number one we may get our sixth title this year but who's counting you know so I don't know if you like you sports has become a refuge since the election so so we are following that closely I came straight to law school and now shockingly 20 years ago 19 years ago I came here to law school and I would say on campus I was you know a fairly good student I guess but I was more a diversity and public interest sort of warrior you could say so I was one of six students out of our class of 600 who didn't work at a firm the second year summer and now remember also context is everything this is the summer of 1999 when the market was the frothiest and white-hot you know you you literally could just email any firm and say oh I'd like to come and they would fly you out and you know things were going well cell phones we you know whereas on campus when the internet was invented so you know the summer that summer we came back and everyone had a cell phone so this was the rapid kind of like all the trinkets were coming out so then I went I clerked for a bit then I got a scat and fellowship where I worked at the ACLU and a civil rights shop and then I moved into politics so I was one of the early employees of the Center for American Progress I worked for John Podesta there and then I had the the gall or the I don't know what you would call it but I moved back to Wichita my parents are still there and I became the first South Asian Asian-American elected in Kansas history I defeated a three-term Republican incumbent and ran a pretty interesting campaign in 06 it was probably the largest State House win for the Democrats in the country that year it was in this little tiny you know district in Wichita and then I ended up it was very involved in the Obama-Hillary campaign in 08 and then in 2010 I ran for Congress and we got beat badly and the gentleman who defeated me is now the designee to run the CIA so elections have consequences and I hope for our country's sake that Mike does a good job and so I then moved to New York where my wife was a partner at Whiten case and she's now a partner Proscauer so which I'm going to get into because we the the institution of the big law firm is obviously something that you need to be much more aware of and I'm going to go on a limb that you're you're you're not very aware of what's happening in the industry and the profession and you need to be more aware of it and so I then worked in philanthropy I ran a family office did some and did a lot of political work and we and then I started both all about three years ago with my colleague with a different mind from law school actually is HLS 99 Keith and Jivari and so we've been at this for several years we're proud to have Ari as an investor and so I could tell you more about the company we'll do that in discussion but I'd like to more frame some discussion points as to why we're doing this and also really some macro points that really have nothing to do with the company but of course inform it and so one is that the state of the legal profession of legal education and of the industry is badly badly fucked and and you would never know this walking around this campus and in fact I would say that everyone here almost everyone here is is almost has blinders on as to actually what's happening in the world of the law and so and it's interesting because to be at Harvard Law School as we were you're the were the incumbents and we're part of the status quo I mean there's you know in fact I have an incredible young college kid I'm mentoring out of New York who was in 20 foster homes and it's an incredible story and you know he's not you saw me note the other day his dream is to go to Harvard Law School he wants you know he has accomplished and overcome more barriers than most of us would ever dream of and his dream is to go to Harvard Law School so there is a mythic place that this institution represents not only in our culture but certainly in the profession and so it is good to raise these issues I think here because one might think that this institution or institutions on par of the caliber what what have you the these are the elite adjectives that that that we elites use you know people who think like us should be raising questions of innovation and disruption change and yet this is the exact opposite place for any of those things to occur so Chris mentioned it I think diplomatically as is his role that says oh this is a profession that has been slow on innovation slow on innovation I mean the last thing that was innovative in the law was the Magna Carta I mean you know this is an industry and a profession and you would all many of you are too young to know this law firms initially resisted email okay there are this is very clearly documented that the partners that main line law firm said our clients will not handle the the trusted documents over electronic mail we must have our runners in our couriers you know go to the courthouse and do these things so the notion of bearing one's head in the sand is almost an insult the sand when it when it comes to actually how this profession is is sclerotic and so now and so the question becomes so the diagnosis which I'm going to talk a little bit more about for turning over Ari is easy diagnoses are generally easier than prognosis is obviously but it is it would stretch credulity to think that a profession can stand alone and isolated and not be and not have change come to it the way that it's happened to every other profession so ask a banker ask someone in health care Chris you know think about your wife talking about an HIV AIDS researcher think about the market forces that his wife is going through and the in the economics of health care forget even Obama care about international research pharmaceuticals I mean you know and so you know one thing I say I mean I'm a proud New Yorker now you know the safest investment in New York for decades it was like gold was a taxi medallion if you wanted to make money you got yourself and it was actually it was actually a cartel and it was a clubby group of people who were on paper at least billionaires I don't know would any of you invest in the taxi medallion right now and that's in a short few years of course uber is the leading disruptor there but it's even bigger than that so disruption inevitably must come my parents were fee for service mom and pop clinical docs in Kansas had a pretty good life in the 80s slowly managed care came and then of course now they were completely squeezed out being solo private practice physicians and now of course you know I don't know if any of you are either involved in the health care profession or a family you know that you essentially can't be a solo private practice physician anymore and so change happens to industries think about banking there are cyclical forces of you know again we live in New York so we know a lot of people in the finance community so when the recession hits and the crisis happens they contract and then there's fights over over you know their market forces at play yet there seems to be almost no market forces that are at play in our profession in your profession and this industry so and the in the slice of the world that both Allah sits in we are creating market helping create a marketplace for when you hire people like my wife so right now so that's a word-of-mouth business it's a functionally a no bid contract to a good to a friend of yours who overbills you that is what the that is what and for the students you know most of you are going to be doing in some way in some you know shape or other over the next it despite the fact that you're gonna want to do something different the numbers don't lie I think it's about 70% of you will end up in these firms and so you really can sum up the status of the legal system if you were on Martian coming from outer space to say look at this great country that is in it you and already is gonna get to this in the future of the country but how remarkable this country is you would say look at what all the things we've done but if you look at the legal system you would say what the hell was going on here so let me give you six words again I came out of politics we don't do PowerPoints we talk so it's poor sucks middle feared or scared rich obnoxious what are those six words mean the poor get no legal services at all and don't tell me about pro bono services that you think will greenwash your conscience when you're on Wall Street at these firms with the 40 hours a year that the law firms yeah I thought that really solves all the problem yeah it's also not to mention you know filing habeas petitions on death penalty cases really important work but you know it's fact that you can like sit there and you know there's law students and lawyers you can always get another memo you can always footnote another citation so you know that may make you feel good are we being responsive to the problems that actually the needy and our community have I don't think so I ran a small family foundation we gave micro grants the true grassroots organizations that needed legal help they didn't know what the hell a scat in arps is not to go and not to mention going through the gauntlet of the bureaucracy of getting approved to be a client of one of these firms you know and so the fact of the matter is and I don't know how many of you've been to a legal aid office I was in the legal aid bureau I'm always proud when I walked into this building but you know I was in the Kansas legislature we funded the Kansas legal services agency or or you know there was a line on in the budget it was pennies on the dollar go to a legal aid office outside of a coastal elite city of the five elite cities of this country you will be shocked you will see 200 case files paper cuts and you will see an absolute yawning need not even remotely being met by what we are all by the profession we're in if you're a middle class if you're in the middle class you are scared the hell out of lawyers get them away from me I means a divorce an accident something bad happened they're expensive that is a net loss of something you know in the transactions I'm involved in and if you're wealthy you know my wife's rack rate is $1,050 an hour now I wish she was paid $1,050 an hour but she's also she's compensated well but there is clearly and this is the reason we're in business a overhang and the fact that there isn't a marketplace that actually is getting to a market tested price when you get to a market tested price in any other markets say transportation obviously there's attempts to do that in health care you will see a rapid and significant decrease in the price of even elite legal services so this legal system is not serving our country well it's certainly not serving our people well and legal education has a big role in that think about what's happening in legal education 204 law schools I believe that's the number all aping the Harvard model there is still I mean the vast majority of this courses could be on YouTube as you know and so what the dis the innovation in legal education I strain to find any true innovation so maybe you have some clinical programs here or there I think and I'm not just saying this to to praise our hosts here I think I was here when the Berkman Center was was birthed by Charlie Nessen and John Zittrain who were my torts professors it's an amazing institution that is on the forefront of doing things that are innovative in its area of the law so it's in a swim lane in fact I proposed a topic for Chris actually about the legal operations and he nicely said hey look it's very interesting but it's really not our ambit we are innovating in this space Ari is deeply expert in that space technology policy in the law and so on good you know that's that's a substantive area of innovation but you know frankly that is really not where it's certainly not where the perfect it's not affecting the profession and and certainly legal education I'll just close by saying that you know the modern law firm is a very interesting institution and that you know there are increasing articles you might have seen that there's mergers of law firms and so on so there is a great article by the great progressive jurist William Renquist in 1987 that was a joke and so you know at the time a while exactly right right sorry sorry sorry he was on the Supreme Court and so William Renquist wrote in 1987 he said the modern law firm some of which approximate 300 lawyers okay keep in mind the largest law firm in the world right now has 3,000 lawyers and some of them have building requirements of 2,000 hours per year keep in mind my wife when she's a third year devil voice bill 3,300 hours that year there's a reason she's a partner so not devil voice but at another firm and that these pressures on the profession will raise severe ethical quandaries because who among us has the courage ethically to talk to a client and say no to an actual matter or a decision that will actually cost me revenue I mean how often do you all or do we I'm you know none of us is Gandhi how many of us do things that are against our economic interest as a pretty rare thing please take money out of my pocket I'd like to give it to you it's not something that's actually happens very often so the the structures and these ethical quandaries for what's happening out there are actually far more profound than I think people really realize let me just say one final thing is about diversity I did mention that a lot of diversity work when I was on campus so I suspect that if you took a survey of the student body here 95% of you would say something like diversity is an important live to value I want to be involved in institutions that value diversity diversity I want to live in a diverse environment that that tolerates and in fact encourages a diversity of viewpoints by gender by socioeconomic class by race of course the law is the least diverse profession white collar profession in the country by a country mile it's not even close so what happens is of and here's the data the New York City bar I mean there is umpteen reports on this go to an organization called lcld they have all these convenings on this the New York City bar just did a big report that said in the first year class you get fairly representative examples of women and racial minorities who comprise the associate ranks by the time the partner ranks come it plummets precipitously as we were joking Indian Americans for example I think have done fairly well they do run Google small little start-up you know there is an African-American president we just almost elected and she won more votes than the other guy a female nominee for president I think that every other profession has seen incredible diversity I don't think there's something inherent about the law that's too hard for us I don't I don't really think that structurally blue booking is beyond the capacity of the Asian-American brain or females or others I think there's actually something more structurally screwed in how the and how the and how the institutions are actually moving along and so when they come to recruit you of course it's glossy and there's pro bono and and there is um you know of course there's probably a really nice photos of a diverse place look at the data you're really smart you can do this and ask these questions so sorry there's so much there to work off of I think my my pitch for this room is gonna I would have talked about them a completely different three weeks ago but you know I was giving some thought to my own career as as a lawyer so I used to be an engineer and with the general council of tumbler for four and a half years and when I was a tumbler we did a lot of work on that neutrality which hopefully is an important thing for the people in this room because you know people at HLS have been working on it for a long time and now suddenly you know it's all gonna go away and I was thinking about sort of what is my guiding light been in my career and did I learn any of that when I was here and and I concluded no and the guiding light for me has been sort of an on-airing moral compass so there's a lot of talk here at when you're a student about legal ethics but there's almost no talk about sort of the morality of what you're doing as a lawyer like whether or not you're actually helping people whether or not sort of the the core tenets of of your career and the work for your clients is actually making things better and I think there there's a strange sort of sense among lawyers that you're taught like every client deserves representation so you know you're you're sort of taught this like a morality that I think is is is pretty harmful so when I started out as a lawyer I was a patent litigator and how many people know a lot about the patent system in this country yeah it's it's it's a disaster and I felt that I was sort of immorally contributing to the system by being a cog in the machine so I went and became a corporate lawyer didn't feel like I was helping people that way either and sort of have made these moves to to sort of be a moral person and that in turn has made my work to me at least like really relevant and I think that's something that you are not taught at the school you're not taught at any law school it's sort of antithetical to law practice in fact and now we're at a political moment where that actually is one of the most important things for lawyers because from everything I know lawyers are the the tools and weapons of the establishment to use against the polities like the lawyers are gonna be the ones who sort of implement Donald Trump's pronouncement today that he wants to strip citizenship from anyone who burns a flag I mean you literally said this today which is hilarious I guess perfect sense totally totally makes sense if you're if you're an authoritarian and and so my my pitch is is for this school and the people here and for lawyers to really start thinking about themselves as moral actors in the universe and not just a moral tools of their clients and my advice to everybody's like find your issue right so for me it was net neutrality and I was like okay like we're gonna hammer the hell out of this net neutrality issue like we're gonna we literally had a meeting with Tom Wheeler where where I my boss David Karp who's founder of Tumblr and the CEOs of a bunch of New York City tech startups got in a room with Wheeler and just yell at him for an hour about not doing title to and it helps I mean a really it really did help and it's such an odd thing now that that an administrative agency with a Democratic president that was fully independent and supposedly insulated from political pressure had to get beat up by a bunch of New York City tech startups to do the right thing but but that was it was in that kind of work that I as a lawyer like sort of found meaning and thought I was doing good and helping people and so my pitch is really for for you guys to recast yourselves rather than like oh I'm gonna go through this like law firm churn model which by the way is this increasingly irrelevant I mean I was general counsel four and a half years like the service from large law firm sucks the costs are too high I was doing most of the work myself I mean if you actually look and sit at the work that you're doing like it's not really that hard like some random dude off the street could really do this work like like I was sort of illegally practicing law before I got here and it was really funny like like the first day Dean Kagan who's now in Supreme Court gave this speech to everybody and I found it the most offensive speech that I've heard in a really long time and it was like you've all arrived you're all now at Harvard nothing will ever be wrong in your lives again I mean I'd like I'm paraphrasing but not you'll always have a job everything's great just relax and I was I was like already working at law firm and I'm like she is entirely full of shit like that's not actually how it works and the beauty of it was like things cratered what so I graduated in 08 things cratered in 09 and suddenly HLS students like can't find jobs either so you guys are inculcated by this school into this sort of establishment ideology and way of thinking about your profession in the world that I think we don't really have a lot of time to fuck around with that stuff anymore given what's happening in the government and so my my call to action is for you guys to think a little bit differently but please I mean we have half an hour to talk about stuff so you see the former elected goes five times longer than the yeah but you pay you can talk but you packed more content that you know one thing I just actually off what you said I realized that I had asked this rhetorical question but I think it keys off exactly what you said which is I suspect I don't know who the dean of Harvard Medical School is but I suspect he or she is probably asked every 10 minutes what's the future of American healthcare like tell me what are the structural drivers what are the institutions going to look like who's going to be served what what are the who are the who are the winners and the losers the pros and the cons what are the market forces at play sure there's research and and I you know I think Dean Minow is about as lovely a person as I know and thinks hard about these questions but she's not actually demanded to answer these questions I know she does it because she's an interesting thoughtful person but it's not actually in her job in fact and what people want to focus on is if you take the healthcare example will you of course just like the Berkman Center needs to do its thing it needs to innovate and you know understand net neutrality and you know if I had if I was in your shoes and somebody as expert as Ari came in and talked about title to I mean he you know Ari should have a move moved a mountain I mean he helped play a pivotal role in protecting and saving the internet I mean these are not in small inconsequential for less than a year but for but elections have consequences but but the point being that we those questions we need so the Dean of Harvard Medical School needs to make sure that the unit devoted to mitochondrial research to find the gene that can prevent diabetes that's super super important you don't spend all day thinking the macro thoughts but you have to do these things in parallel and so there is an entire system in the law that's not being activated of asking those deep core questions of what does the law look like why is it structured like this you know the president had the audacity to suggest the third year of law school is unnecessary of course some might throw shade on the first and second years too and the establishment carved him up you know and he actually kind of retreated from it how dare you you know change the and and why are there three years of law school because it's a business do you know that law schools were profit centers for the universities the deans of law schools had juice because they were profitable for the mothership now that's far less so because the number of law school applications are dropping law schools are gonna close markets actually can work but there are reasons for this it's not just because the 11th commandment you know when Moses came back was oh actually look law schools six semesters and you got to follow the Langdillian method I mean you know that's really that's not inscribed anywhere that third year is really useless though man like yes I'm sitting through 3L year and I'm like this this is completely a waste of my time except for like one class which was which was great but like but I mean I think I've challenged every law school sort of professor that I've had and no one actually has a good answer as to why the third year exists except for the extra 50k plus in revenue in the school's pocket like like there's no reason for it like they should just send you out to a law firm to do an apprenticeship or something yeah well we've yeah please rocks tomatoes please various scenarios I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about both the ethics of being a moral actor in some scenarios you could imagine trying to be more actors is complicated say someone in the military as well as the economic forces around being a moral actor you mentioned you had a long career but only sort of felt satisfied for one year of it yeah I mean I mean it's good set of interrelated questions I have a bunch of friends now who are at the U.S. Attorney's Office in SDNY which is sort of the premier U.S. Attorney's Office in the country and they're all like struggling with this question because they're like do I stay and have Jeff Sessions as the Attorney General and try to do my job in sort of the best way possible and help people with two hands handcuffed behind my back basically or do I leave because I'm not I don't won't agree with the Attorney General's priorities and the people he's going to put in charge of the office and that's just not there's never an answer to that question right for me it was just like am I going to work every day feeling bad about what I'm doing or not it was very like gut level emotional like like am I waking up and do I feel good about what I'm doing and do I think that I'm helping people and that was it and that has just always been my compass and at the moment where I'm like I don't really think I'm helping people anymore I go do something else like and the way that dovetails economics is like you're gonna have to roll the dice on stuff that you didn't think you'd have to roll the dice on like as lawyers you are trained to be risk-averse like that is which is also the wrong way to train lawyers but that's a separate conversation and your training starts when you're here when they funnel you into these like law firm application processes at law firms that are just faceless mindless places that will generally abuse you for five years before you get sick of it and leave and you only actually know that you've actually had people come to campus like us I'm sure before and tell you like they're all terrible and your economic incentives are tilted towards going down that path because you're all in so much debt so for me like this is not advice it's replicable but I was like okay I'm working at this law firm I know I don't like it I'm gonna plow all my money into paying my loans off so I can go do something else so my like I gave myself the freedom to get out by paying my loans down so aggressively that I could go and like I literally I was like a fifth year litigation associate I demoted myself to a first-year corporate associate just to switch out of litigation because being a litigator traps you into being a litigator forever which is another piece of advice I'll give you like if you're going to litigation and you're not sure about it like think really hard and probably don't do it but I think like for me it's been a lot of like following my my conscience and my gut over making like super hyper logical choices because then I would just fall into the trap of like all the structures here sort of funnel me down this path that I know will lead me to doing things I don't like that don't help people that will sort of not be the best thing and I have to like resist that I'll just say quickly two points which is you know individual morals obviously individual and maybe I'm being a little more libertarian on that which is I don't judge other people's decisions I knew I made judgments every day I made 1600 votes on the Kansas House floor you know I never served in the military but as you mentioned I'm sure people in combat have to make ethical decisions you make in the business room you make in the boardroom and so on and so you know I personally with my career path I should you know maybe I should then become a strategic consultant or a lobbyist and made a great deal money instead I plowed right into a startup so I'm just sort of a natural entrepreneur in the political sense philanthropic now in the business sense so that's just me but I don't I would certainly never impose that on anyone else I'm more focused as you can tell by the tenor of my remarks on structural immorality which is that this is a profession in an industry that is structurally has deep moral questions that people should ask and so as Ari was very eloquently describing about you know the questions he's faced it's because the structures are not serving you well and so therefore you know none of us has the moral backbone of Mandela or Gandhi these are very rare people out of the ten billion on on the globe you know there's a handful of people who are so strong and so focused and so smart that they can see the promised land and know where to go I'm not like that and so structures that are moral in their in their integrity and in their genetic code help guide us toward moral decisions and so right now as you know where what I would say and you mentioned the law firm model ask some deep questions about the future of that law firm model by the way so as you I think sort of mentioned they may not be replicable what you did my wife did that she paid off her loans in seven years you know the there is an argument out there that the big law model is going towards something called the death spiral so there's something called profits per partner and again they shield you from this because they talk about the summer outing and they talk about pro bono and whatever other you know and it's a nice thing at the Charles hotel that they take you to and maybe there's a dinner and I've hosted a lot of those cocktails I get it but the reality is that the metric at a law firm just like Harvard Law School's metric is what the US News and World Report ranking now Harvard's probably got a brand that can maybe exempt itself from that but the only metric that matters to the industry you must understand this of the amla 200 firms is PPP called profit partner that is the only that is the North Star of what they think about and if you ever get any deleveraging of one of these firms so both all of might provide that or many of these other innovations if you have general councils who get it like Ari you will see their model is built on leverage and when you get that leverage model it actually can collapse on itself and what are you seeing right now firms that I would have been around for years going out of business mega mergers we know how often synergies are found in mergers let's see how this turns out so these are questions you should be asking because even your default path may not even be there and you're gonna be saddled up with this debt and there may not be in ten years five years who knows this easy gilded path to even pay this stuff off so well I mean you know one thing to point out like law firms really don't make a lot of partners anymore so so they they sort of offer you this path like oh no stay here for seven years no we're gonna extend it to 11 and then you'll be partnered and it's like no that doesn't happen that way because you have this log jam of sort of like 45 50 plus year old partners who are taking all the profits that when they add a partner PPP goes down so they don't actually even make partners anymore so you're trapped in this weird limbo of being like a service partner or a junior partner something where you don't actually have equity in the business and they just kind of con you and string you along for like forever and that's gonna keep that's those economic forces are gonna keep getting worse no matter how anyone disrupts anything it's just like it's it's just sort of a population issue that they can't make more partners and they don't want to share the ones who are there to want to share the wealth so that's the other thing like if you're assuming that you're gonna become Monica my wife sorry it's it's highly unlikely if not almost impossible at this point the fundamental problem is you know the perverse incentive of the billable hour and that's been identified for literally you know decades yeah since the 1980s certainly Rehnquist yeah and the death of the billable hour has been predicted ever since the 90s is there any reason to think that this time there may be a change I mean that's a that's a fun one because so when I was when I was a toddler I either did all my own work or I tried to do fix the arrangements and and for me but macro I mean are we yeah are we seeing any possible I I think you know I was gonna use my example as a way to sort of introduce fact that the billable hour is not going away if only because like there's a certain caliber of lawyer who will never go on so like so I did all my own work except I was willing to pay for like really good people and they would never agree to fix fee they always bill by the hour and I could never like wean them off of that and so like fix fee I think like non billable hour work I think for the sort of lower to middle end of the market is like accepted now in some reasonable sense but when you're getting to like sort of the what I would call the high end like the really expensive stuff like they won't they won't ever like they just won't take you it's not enough money yeah and obviously this is what we do and so one you know an argument and of course the answer is unknown but you raise a great question which is even the chair of a major law from Whiten case said look the billable hour is dead but obviously he's got a two billion dollar corporation that's built on the billable hour so I would say this which is getting a car before uber you could do it right uber didn't invent the car didn't invent the black car nor did it what you have to do at least in New York was yet to call it really rude dispatcher and then you'd wait and then it would be the friction was so high that you wouldn't do it so what is uber at its core it's just a geolocator interface on your phone which reduces the friction of getting a car or it doesn't own anything it doesn't own the driver doesn't own the car it owns no assets it's just a marketplace where all you're doing is using your phone to eliminate friction in this pre uber world to get the car so the analogy here is and this is certainly something that we're doing at Bodala and let's see how it goes which is if the friction of so Ari's friction was too high to eliminate the billable hour in certain arrangements but if it actually you have functional free-flowing marketplace where actually that that friction is reduced such that the client can get it we do think that we're gonna see a much more rapid adoption of fixed fee arrangements and what really should happen are entrepreneurial arrangements right which is actually some skin in the game where if things go well or you know bankers have you heard of broken deals when you know bankers I have one of my best friends in Milwaukee's a health care banker he works a year on a deal and it busts he doesn't like take a vacation that year because that's that's the way a market works he didn't he didn't the deal didn't get consummated well you know lawyers insist on getting paid and you know even when the deals go bust and so the short answers we don't know but there are a lot of different models and we're certainly I guess my my question to Ari is was it friction that was causing you to pay up you know $2,000 an hour for a partner at a big firm or was it fear of less friction than I think sort of because it seems to me that you know well what what what people are able the reason people can't be moved off the billable hour is because they know that at the end of the day people are worried about some huge uncertainty and they're willing to pay up big time well I'll give you I'll give you an example so my my now friends but formerly someone I hired Dave Kramer as a partner at Wilson Sincini he's he's as far as I'm concerned the best copyright lawyer in the country and also just a great guy so so he does not bill on a fixed fee and I would just use I'm just like calm up and so so that to me it was it wasn't fear so much as like that was worth my money I guess and so I think there's that segment of the market where you have people like Monica who are kind of worth the money to the people that are paying them and maybe there's some underlying sort of fear or something that's that's driving it but I don't see that segment ever going away as sort of an hourly service I think everything else is commoditizable so like if you think about the work that I was doing day to day at Tumblr I was like writing vendor contracts dealing with inbound people for threatening to sue us you know any like dozens of things like that all of that is commoditizable you could get a kid off the street to do the work I was doing just as well for one one hundredth the cost of someone who is trained by Harvard Law School like like being a lawyer is not that special and like the protectionism of the ABA and the cartels has sort of made it extremely difficult to become a lawyer but like that work is commoditizable and is getting commoditized I think like calling up a Dave Kramer is something that like will always sort of have an hourly fee attached to it because like he's his knowledge and his sort of instincts are not something that you can just like have someone off the street sometimes I count within like one kilometer I count with ten or sixteen little posters telling you what you can do within that video you can park your car between this time you can you know so no walking on the grass no walking at this point you must leash your dog at this point you can leash your dog you know and so on and so forth so I keep wondering what would be the cost of because in my view such a regulated country everything is regulated so if I was coming to start whatever business it is whether it's philanthropic whether it's commercial I would certainly need the services of somebody who's day-to-day job just to understand all the little things in that that's I've been in the freedom to do the business so probably is a dog leashing lawyer in Cambridge I suspect that's enough to make a business on it that the legal system is so complex and so written that you also need an expert in the system to help you and then the second question would be then what would disrupt this kind of very closed and protectionist kind of ecosystem you know if you trusted Donald Trump you wanted to sort of drain that swamp right so so the idea of being that like we live under how many people in the room have taken admin law here if you have not if you're a student year and you have not you should it was probably the most useful class I took here and you come out of that understanding your observation is correct like the US actually is is sort of a giant administrator apparatus and there's rules and regulations for everything and lawyers built the apparatus and so it's a full employment act for lawyers so like you need a lawyer to understand all the crap that the lawyers wrote that that you don't understand and so so if you sort of took Mr. Trump but his word he was gonna drain the swamp which to some extent means like regulating a bunch of the stuff and you know I I think that's a problem that has been identified for many many years to the extent it is a problem because as you've learned in admin law there's like a cost benefit analysis all these these regulations and sometimes the benefit outweighs the cost and so you know I would I would see that to me today that's a state and local focus issue I think Democrats in particular focus way too much on on the federal level to the abandonment of state and local politics so a lot of things you talk about are like even starting a company that's a state level issue in large part and so I think the people in this room for example could have a lot of impact on sort of figuring out what the with the right laws and regulations are at a state level away from the federal government but yeah I mean like it's a kind of very complicated like set of questions I would only add to the protectionism of the profession point you mentioned the ABA and so on it is something that needs to be again people just assume walking around this campus that it's like the 11th commandment oh right the ABA runs these things and oh right this is the way it should be regulated there's an interesting right left convergence happening on this issue of regulation so it's mostly thought of as like the yoga teacher stuff so this is incumbent protection so you know I actually I had a constituent when I was in the ledge you know he owned a beauty salon he owned a hair salon they said why do I need 200 hours to have some bureaucrat and Topeka tell me you know I own an Aveda salon I'm well trained and Aveda salons are nice you know they do the scalp massage and so you know and and and they have mint in their products and so you know and it and if it opened my eyes I was like oh I just assumed that that was a thoughtful regulation why why is that licensing board there and you know the yoga example has been the one where it actually stifles entrepreneurship to your point because you have to go through all these regulatory burdens and so the the actual regulation of how you become a lawyer what are I mentioned how lawyers function deeply perverse and I think there is you know there is a there's a slight issue that probably was never discussed on this campus that should have been which is the fact that non-lawyers can't own a law firm and the ABA did a commission on this it almost got through you know the ABA actually is a legislature it's called the House of Delegates and which is fascinating and so there is actually in the UK they now allow non-lawyers to own law firms so private equity models and investors are moving into this and so you know there is innovation and there must be vastly more in how we even set up the services that we do so how would you break the ABA though like what is I don't the problem is they have their hands in the pockets of every politician so you can't for example get tort reform which is badly needed past at the federal level because they just kill it usually with the Democrats but I actually don't even know how to sort of break that cartel well it depends on what the issue is you know on ownership that sort of I mean it's not actually well it's so far in this country has thought of that has been thought of positively to have white collar professions regulate themselves medicine you know in the law now I think that regulation has been badly badly done I mean there are thousands of bad doctors who should not have a medical license thousands of bad lawyers who should not have a legal law license so we'll leave it to another time to figure out how you know the ABA actually I'm not super in the weeds of the ABA but I do think it's an emerging consensus that this that this all-knowing colossus that sits in Chicago with their fancy building is probably not treating is not serving our country as well as it should I know we have 10 minutes left so shorten our answers my fault I was wondering how the profession is going to deal with what I see is a demand-supply mismatch in the sense that there are people that can't get lawyers and there are lawyers that can't get jobs like firms won't hire them they won't train them and then you have people they're just like sorry I can't afford whatever yeah let me take it right at this one yeah it's an awesome question perfectly positioned which is that's the point I was making about kind of structural immorality here so you put your finger on it exactly which is I think there was an article by David Siegel on the Times a few years ago I don't know if you read in the Sun at times he's the Hagler he runs these this little column about consumer complaints but he wrote this great piece I may get some of these details wrong but Tennessee if anyone's from Tennessee I believe you don't have to go to an accredited law school to sit for the bar getting back to another regulation that's actually just incumbency protection so you know what why can't you sit for the bar exam I mean who says so the ABS to bless the you know and so on so but in Tennessee there's a local school and those folks go they have like $30,000 in debt their local prosecutors their local public defenders to Ari's point they're awesome lawyers they're just as good as you are they're just as good as we are even though they didn't go to a fancy school and so that's a marketplace that's functional because the the debt loads are proper the costs are right the the payoff and income for that person is right so there are structural imbalances that you nail which is these big law firms are obviously super they're the personification of elitism where you only you don't even get a look if you go to a certain law school even if you're really talented and so on so I would say that the combination of legal education and this concentration of the big law firms are ending up with the results that you just mentioned so I believe in other countries and I'm not as expert on this as I should be there are levels of lawyers say in the UK for example so it's not just this one you know monolithic example of this hundred fifty thousand dollars of six semesters that could all be on YouTube I mean that I mean like you one has to ask yourself what is this model I mean is this serving anybody well we've already known you know our view is it serving you well I mean you're a lot of your students ask yourself that I mean and so that I would say it starts at the very beginning of the pipeline which is the legal education model is fucked and it's fucking the profession one one example of the point you just raised at Brooklyn Law School the students of Brooklyn Law School actually sued Brooklyn Law School a few years ago for lying about employment statistics which all law schools do actually they claim they claim full employment at high salary levels and it's it's actually just a bold-faced lie and half of them are at Starbucks yeah and so they sued Brooklyn Law School for doing this and so one thing I've noticed I live in Brooklyn and I've noticed students out of Brooklyn Law School can't find jobs they actually are hustling to go and find clients they go they pass a bar they hustle and go and find clients on their own so they're solving the mismatch issue by actually like being entrepreneurial because they don't have a choice so I see that as sort of something that that hopefully helps alleviate the problem a little bit because they're they're now in a community where like startups are cool like starting your own thing is cool the problem is that they're not very good because they haven't been trained and so they're training themselves on the dime of their like you know clients who can't really pay that much money and so there's this weird gap where they're like doing bad work for a while until they figure it out and I don't know how to fix that but to your point I think it's a huge problem that that students are actually trying to fix themselves and I haven't wanted to shill for my company during this but we aim to solve that so that's one that's one possible solution so but can I just ask so are these like do you hear this anywhere I mean we we made a bunch of assertions that you don't hear this on campus from no evidence yeah with no evidence so feel free to tell us that you're getting this in every other public speech and you're bored in the submission yeah I mean I haven't been here in eight years so maybe like they're being honest yeah please I'd love to get some feedback on whether or not you think we're completely just you know arrogant schmucks or if you think this is this is truth-telling those are not mutually yeah exactly yeah don't get my wife sorry no but yeah you I think you hear this fairly regularly and it's something kind of on the back of our minds I mean I think most of us still end up going to work for a firm and there's a there's a couple factors at play here where you know in the last few weeks after the election there's been a lot of talk like okay what do we do now how do we kind of get into action how do I change my life path everybody wants to go work for the aclu the aclu hires like one person yeah um there's just not there there aren't that many options in our mind for um and whether or not they exist or not in our minds it's like there's not really many paths that we can just so when you say you hear in this can you a little bit more like what do you hear about the law firms are under economic duress or do you hear that there's structural problems in the entire profession and so on it's a lot more of the structural stuff structural problems um yeah I think a number of uh speakers will come through and kind of tell us that a few people kind of offer solutions or give the guidance so so basically it's like we're left with oh crap this profession is is you know fucked as you say yeah we're not going to tell you what to do though or how to fix it or uh or you know you're graduating in a year and you have to make your job decision two years before you graduate uh we're not going to help you out there though like uh well you know what the problem like the problem there is there isn't much we can tell you right and I thought it was interesting that that everyone's like oh we'll go work for the aclu because the thought process is I'm going to go try to apply for a job somewhere that I know that they're hiring versus like I'm going to actually think about like just opting out of this whole mess and think like like one of my one of my friends who graduated my year went to work for McKinsey and she then went to work for a vc and like now runs her own small she started like three small businesses and like that's what she's been doing and so like you're you have the privilege being here that your hls degree actually gives you credibility doing like 3 000 different other things that are not and do not involve you going to take the bar exam at all and maybe they won't pay as much at first but they might actually be more rewarding and like like you might like them better um you know entrepreneurship is one that I always like kind of shove people toward as like a bucket but like put that aside so I think the school itself is sort of like putting you on these guardrails of like oh I have to apply to one of these like kind of like handful of things that everyone else is applying to like your a hls degree actually gives you you can go and do a whole lot of other stuff that other people can't um and whether or not you're actually qualified to do those things it doesn't matter you have Harvard on your resume um and and Harvard uh you know while while being the home of white nationalist Steve Bannon also is the home of like a lot of business leaders out in the world uh and so like I would I would just encourage you guys like I can't tell you what to do because I just did a bunch of rain of shit and kind of got to where I am and I'm still not in a stable place so like it and yeah I would echo that anyway I mean I would actually push back a little bit I don't think it's an obligation of somebody to tell you what to do I mean like I thought the notion was you you're a really thoughtful guy and you got in here like figured out I mean we're I'm 20 years older than you and I'm still figuring it out and I've had five careers I've run a foundation I've served as a politician I've written I now started a company and like nobody yeah neither of us has had like a stable yeah exactly so and and and as our right now right people are telling you essentially like hear the two options you work at a firm or you work in public interest and we're here to say there are many other right right right and and I think that's what's missing is sure is really you don't see uh many other people kind of either coming to law school or you know the career services are there to put you in a in the garden yeah and the other thing is not I need to say one point about public interest because I love Alexa to death and Judy and I was you know a scat and fellow I mean I've got the gold plated public interest resume and already mentioned state-based work I chair the board of the state state innovation exchange which is the progressive organization fighting the right and state capitals would commend you to look at that if you're in politics data innovation org I did my plug there but it's an important one you know this public interest versus private sector dialectic is also really a not a very interesting one and and I say that from the belly of the beast I mean you as I said I didn't work at a law firm I was Harvard legal aid bureau I was a scat and fellow there's nothing more like you know put put the put the soft liberal line on me you it would apply on in that in that sense but it's really not that dynamic and I get it I was at like my kids parents cocktail the day after the election this guy goes oh man I'm so pissed I just dropped five grand at the ACLU I was like well there's a warrior for justice you know I mean like wow you know you know you're to the streets brother I mean so I think that I think that you know and I don't blame you at all because it's hard to envision these things and and that's why you know Ari's career paths I mean really interesting there's a lot of people who probably had those skills and interests but weren't able to make the moves to kind of be there and help shape net neutrality and sell a company for a billion dollars to Yahoo and these are interesting things and so you know at the end of the day I mean we'll tell you what we're doing I mean I run a I run a company and we've got 10 people and we hope to have a hundred people you know and at some point we'd love to talk to you and so you know there are and then of course as you said as Ari said there's so much that you can do that you should just match to what you're interested in it took me a while and I even screwed on I clerked why the hell did I clerk I mean look at me should listen to what I say should I be reading memos I mean Jesus it was like miserable it was like being in the dentist chair every day and I was like what the fuck am I doing here but you know and I did it and I'm obviously no shrink and violet because I get it you know the guardrails are there and so you know my wife and I now have an understanding we've been together 17 years like I'm the innovator and the entrepreneur and I'm the you know if you was like a stock portfolio she's the blue chip and and I'm the growth stock or or or maybe the bomb stock you know let's see but that's our dynamic and we and we live a lifestyle that we're comfortable with that and we do that because I can't be happy you know I'm not I don't want to do those things and she doesn't want to do what I do so that's a long way of saying you know you figure these things out all we're doing here is to as pushing you to please ask these questions and think beyond the guardrails because the guardrails are not only changing rapidly cue my business but also we're raising moral questions about them as well yeah so you had yeah yeah then yeah yeah yeah so uh as a survivor of a big law associate myself and um someone who now works with hls students i'm wondering sort of thinking about turning audis question to like a practical end when you think about your early jobs out of law school are there things that you are pleased that you took from them lessons that you sort of can could move forward with whether it was a big law job or a clerkship or a scouting fellowship and then are also are there things that you did inside of those organizations that you felt you know say the hls student who's going to take a big law job what should they can they be doing inside of that large law firm that can help create change in the profession what can they do for themselves what can they do for the institutions I'll speak shortly and quickly because Ari is going to be much smarter on this than I am um all I determined was I saw what bad management look like what good management look like and I realized that for me personally I need to be around really good people and um and that's not always the case and by the way that's true in public interest shops private sector shops whatever there's amazing managers and people at Goldman Sachs and there's really crap people at the ACLU and other places because that's humanity so for my only lesson was that I realized that I I knew what the parameters I needed to be fulfilled and happy and to be doing things that I found interesting so it was more almost I would say a self-discovery but then I also saw obviously there's a lot of you know suboptimal organizations out there and you know that I suppose I was a little naive uh going into the workforce and but if you've been out any time you realize that the world the default order of the world is suboptimal and inefficient not the other way around no I think I think Raj is totally right like like the thing that I got out of working in a law firm was that I didn't really want to be a lawyer and so that was that that that self-discovery only comes when you actually sit down and have to do legal work around a bunch of other lawyers for several years and you realize like lawyers are miserable people like this this thing I'm doing is terrible uh I don't want to do this anymore and then you start building a conception of yourself outside of like the thing so I so I actually think it's valuable to go and do the big long thing if only to know that it's not right for you or to discover that it is right for you and then godspeed like you are one of the few people for whom it's going to be right for you and maybe you'll be one of the few partners and otherwise like inside of those machines I can't say that I learned any practical skills at all that that sort of helped me with anything other than then sort of just the self-discovery of knowing that it wasn't the right thing for me to do and even like you know I worked at Fish and Richardson for six years which is which is here in Boston and literally like one person from there now still talks to me because they were so miffed when I left and this is also like a lesson about lawyers like they don't understand the value of relationships usually particularly at law firms and so like yeah they should have been like totally like grease in the wheels with me because I'd like had my own legal budget and might have hired them for something and now never again will I do so uh because you know sort of typical like lawyer pettiness I do have to comment on that it is amazing I mean I've now been to 250 corporate legal departments and it is amazing what the perception of the business world about the legal world lawyers will think after a while oh yeah I know business yeah I advise CEOs all the time lawyers are not good business people they are like just full stop there can be and there's a small slice of CEOs who came out of general counsel job a diminishing one um and so as a general rule you're not really an executive you know you're not making decisions you're kind of saying on the one hand or the other and so on and so the there should be there are not only is the legal provision lacking business principles because there's no markets and there's no accountability and it's kind of like you know the basic rule is just bill as much as you can that's what's rewarded a law firm but they're actually what aria said before it actually then functionally makes you not a great business person in terms of management in terms of executive decision making in terms of like project management I would say I mean actually like to that point I just just to say one more thing staying longer actually like going for a little bit I think is great I would advise students like get out fast though because the longer you stay the more you're inculcated into a set a culture and a set of norms and a way of thinking that actually is actively harmful when you're in a business um you know like one of my mentors the law firm partner at Gunderson-Demmer where I used to work like I'd always call him and I was a toddler I'd be like hey can you help me with this thing and he would he's like he wouldn't ever actually like stick his neck out for me on anything like I had to stick my own neck out on stuff because he never viewed his job as sort of like sticking his neck out and lawyers just don't if you're in it long enough you just don't do that and you cannot succeed in business without sticking your neck out at some point and it's it's stuff like that that if you're in that machine for too long like you can't train yourself out of it this is last uh yeah great thanks yeah I'm Mary Gray I'm a researcher at Microsoft Research and I'm a professor at Indiana University and I came in late so I apologize I was so sure um I know I'm going to hear how much I missed out on you I was so struck by the advice to you that this is exactly what we're saying to graduate students like when you get a PhD I think there's anything more insane than training somebody with a PhD to think that they're only that are only qualified now to have a tenure-track job yeah like it's one of the most destructive things that's happening within higher education yeah so I hear this echoed in higher ed I hear this echoed in journalism so places that had professions and had very professional sensibilities and identities that now can exist if they're willing to shift of a um independent contractor model so I I study contract labor I'm wondering what are your thoughts on the the democratization of legal assistance of being able to have folks who have training and legal expertise being available on on demand on contract through services so you're not working with a law firm it's your gig look I obviously awesome set of points there and I love the examples that I've thought about journalism and so on I was a journalist as you can I've had many jobs I was a journalist and you know things are changing rapidly and it gets actually it's a perfect way to kind of end where we began which is this is a you know completely non-innovative profession so in other professions they think about okay we have to reinvent ourselves you know it's like you know Madonna reinvents herself every five years you know but you know the law prides itself on stability and so that's really I mean you know my dad's a cardiologist this is the golden age of cardiology if cardiologist had simply said we understand how to treat an infarction I mean the innovation in the in cardiology like it'll make you cry like we keep people alive now like Franklin Roosevelt died of blood pressure problems it's sad to think about it now it's like a little pill I mean that's what innovation is like and it's exciting you know it actually can mean that you know these phd's I mean they're out doing amazing things I mean my dear friend who runs Axiom law in New York or she's a number three person there she's a phd in paleontology from Yale okay that was not in the job description that Axiom issued we want phd and dinosaurs but you're right the innovation and of course this empowerment you get from coming with the good degrees can be can be very you know very helpful in that process and last thing I'll just say about the marketplace you mentioned that again to your question is is our model I mean we envision a world um and you know maybe there's degrees that that that will exist or not we're actually in the free flowing marketplace a truly free flowing marketplace you should have spot markets for legal services so for example we're always asked well Raj Bodala will we did an IPO for the lowest price you know our clients saved a million dollars on choice of IPO counsel and that wasn't going to some you know Dewey Cheatham and Howin Piscataway that was making you know Wilkie Farr compete against scatting and so on and because that's how much fat there is we saved a million dollars for our client and people will say oh so is that the lowest price it's not a race to the bottom and a pure market actually let's say three years from now it's a frothy market the price of that IPO should go up you know that's what a true marketplace actually functions like it is not just about a race to the bottom or reverse auction so we do envision a world and by the way it's not just on the it's also on the pro bono side where you know we've talked about a lot but I just needed to say this which is it's it's everything I've said about the the private sector of of course applies but it's a tragedy what happens on pro bono procurement use the word procurement to a pro bono lawyer and they'll be like what are you from like you know what do you work at Goldman Sachs no the hiring of a counsel is procurement and right now it is sad that there are so much there's so much capacity to your question that isn't even getting to the need because we don't have a frictionless marketplace to match so you made great examples about where there's matching going on in other industries that is part of our vision is to create a matching a platform where you can actually get you know need to talent no it's it really is price and information discovery and transparency and like there's no place for that right now for lawyers and the cartelization of the law and the fact you have to be licensed on a state-by-state basis makes it worse because new york has a ton of out of work lawyers because everyone goes to new york takes a new bar if it was easier for them to go to like tenancy or other states the they you know i actually like encourage people to get licensed in places that are not new york city because it's like not like you know the scatans of the world are there but it's not like it may not be the best place for them if they really want to be a lawyer and help people and um have a career and so that that makes it difficult but i was going to say like the the platform that that um roge and his team are building like is attempting to sort of help sort of connect the dots and there aren't really a lot of those or i mean there aren't really a lot of people even working that problem working on a problem right now thank you