Inside Arm, The Hottest Chip Designer After Nvidia

John is joined by Spencer Collins, Executive Vice President and Chief Legal Officer of Arm Holdings, the UK-based semiconductor design firm known for powering over 99% of smartphones globally with its energy-efficient CPU designs.  They discuss the legal challenges that arise from Arm’s unique position in the semiconductor industry. 

Arm has a unique business model, centered on licensing intellectual property rather than manufacturing processors. This model is evolving as Arm considers moving “up the stack,” potentially entering into processor production to compete more directly in the AI hardware space.  Since its $31 billion acquisition by SoftBank in 2016, Arm has seen tremendous growth, culminating in an IPO in 2023 at a $54 billion valuation and its market value nearly doubling since.

AI is a major strategic focus for Arm, as its CPUs are increasingly central to AI processing in cloud and edge environments.  Arm’s high-profile AI projects include Nvidia’s Grace Hopper superchip and Microsoft’s new AI server chips, both of which rely heavily on Arm CPU cores.   Arm is positioned to be a key infrastructure player in AI’s future based on its broad customer base, the low power consumption of its semiconductors, and their extensive security features. 

Nvidia’s proposed $40 billion acquisition of ARM collapsed due to regulatory pushback in the U.S., Europe, and China.  This led SoftBank to pivot to taking 10% of Arm public.  Arm is now aggressively strengthening its intellectual property strategy, expanding patent filings, and upgrading legal operations to better protect its innovations in the AI space.

Spencer describes his own career path—from law firm M&A work to a leadership role at SoftBank’s Vision Fund, where he worked on deals like the $7.7 billion Uber investment—culminating in his current post.   He suggests that general counsel for major tech firms must be intellectually agile, invest in best-in-class advisors, and maintain geopolitical awareness to navigate today’s rapidly changing legal and regulatory landscape.

Podcast Link: Law-disrupted.fm
Host: John B. Quinn
Producer: Alexis Hyde
Music and Editing by: Alexander Rossi

Transcript

Note: This transcript is generated from a recorded conversation and may contain errors or omissions. It has been edited for clarity but may not fully capture the original intent or context. For accurate interpretation, please refer to the original audio.

JOHN QUINN: This is John Quinn and this is Law, disrupted and today we're gonna be speaking with the Chief Legal Officer of the semiconductor chip design firm, Arm Holdings based in Cambridge, England. I mean Arm Holdings is very, very famous for their low power consumption designs, which are used in almost all smartphones in the world.

They license their designs to Apple, for example. They license them to Android suppliers such as Qualcomm and MediaTek. It's a super successful company that was founded 35 years ago in Cambridge on a Turkey farm. As I said,        Arm design chips appear in almost all smartphones, about 300 billion chips altogether.

The company was acquired, was a public company, was acquired by SoftBank in 2016 for about $31 billion. SoftBank took the company public, a very small fraction of the holdings. I think Spencer, doesn't SoftBank own at least 90% of      Arm today. That's right, SoftBank owns about 90%. 

Right, so only 10% of the company was floated, it was listed on Nasdaq.  It was taken public at a valuation, I believe, of approximately $54 billion in 2023. Since then, the valuation of Arm, based upon its market cap has essentially, doubled. So we've gone from an acquisition of Arm by SoftBank at about 31 billion in 2016 to a flotation in 2023 that valued it at 54 billion.

And that's essentially doubled today based on the current market price, if I've got that right, Spencer. 

SPENCER COLLINS: Yeah, I think you've stolen most of my material for this podcast, so I dunno what I'm gonna talk about now. 

JOHN QUINN: So it's a super exciting company with these, in the past, and maybe this is changing now, and we'll probably have a chance to talk about how this. Arm didn't actually make anything.

It designed chips and licensed those chips to others and has been super successful with that business model. But we're reading in the news now,  Spencer, about the possibility that Arm may actually be producing its own chip. Is there anything you can say about that? 

SPENCER COLLINS: As any technology company, you've always got to look to innovate and look to compete with the market and take advantage of market opportunity, and I think Arm is no exception to that. So as of today, the way things stand today, you know, Arm is an IP licensing business as you may refer to. But we are and we've made no secret about this, we are, you know, considering different business models, including moving up the stack. 

JOHN QUINN: So what, of course everybody is talking about, what's top of mind today is artificial intelligence and we know that for Masayoshi Son, the CEO and Chairman of SoftBank, artificial intelligence has been something he's been passionate about for a long time.

I'm sure there is a business plan at Arm for contributing to the development of artificial intelligence. Is there anything that you can say about that? 

SPENCER COLLINS: Yeah. There's no doubt about it. AI is the biggest tech revolution of recent times, I've got no doubt about that. Arm is already playing a major part in that, so if you take a step back, you already mentioned some of  the important stats, John, but you know, Arm tech, it touches more than 70% of the world's population.

We're in over 99% of smartphones, so our platform already is entirely pervasive, and that's all the way from, you know, the clouds to edge devices. If you couple that with the energy efficient foundations that you touched upon, I mean, it sets      Arm up as a company to be the AI platform through our CPUs, right?

So if you take the combination of Arm’s relatedness, performance at scale, energy efficiency, which you touched upon, security, developer flexibility, you know, we are perfectly positioned as a business and I think that's being reflected in the number of AI enabled chips that are being shipped each quarter.

So if you look at our quarterly reports, you'll see that number is increasing exponentially, quarter on quarter. So at the time of our IPO, I mean, people understood our market leading position in terms of, you know, our CPU use of the smartphone industry. But I don't think many people fully appreciated the role that we would have, the major role that we would have with Gen AI, and I think that the penny is starting to drop at people, since then. 

So, as I said, our business continues to evolve, but if you look at the business model at the time, the IPO in its simplest form, you know, we were creating blueprints from which many of the world's most popular CPUs are built. Now it's from the IP that basically drives the revenue in the form of, you know, licensing royalties, from other businesses that are basically paying to use our designs. 

Now, these CPUs, you know, they're used in every area of technology you can imagine, so, smartphones, tablets, TVs, cars, PCs, cloud computing, data centers, smart watches, drones, whatever you can imagine, whatever form of technology you can imagine, you know, you can pretty much guarantee there is a CPU involved and that CPU is basically designed by Arm in one way or another. 

So, the opportunity that Arm has from an AI standpoint is absolutely huge. I mean, if you take the poster boy of AI at the moment, which is obviously a very important customer of Arm, we can come on to talk about, you know, a potential deal that we were looking to do with them quite some time ago. If you look at their Grace Hopper Super chip that actually, you know, combines both GPU and CPU technology on the CPU end, it uses over 140 Arm CPU cores.

That's just Nvidia. You look at Microsoft, their new AI server chip that uses more than 100 of our processes. So those are just two examples out of a multitude. So as we roll out two new versions of our designs, that will basically enable us and our customers to build out additional computing power, to handle the demands of AI at the rapid work rate, which is developing. And that's only going to, in my opinion, increase demand for Arm’s, higher end CPUs. So we really are already on the AI front, a major player, and I think that will just get more and more over time. 

JOHN QUINN: Spencer, you made reference to the potential transaction a few years ago with Nvidia, where I think Nvidia sought to acquire Arm.

There was actually a deal where Arm would be sold to Nvidia, that never happened. I think it was because of the hold up in Brussels, some issues with the competition authorities, or what was that? 

SPENCER COLLINS: Yeah, so it was like, Arm, as you've said, John was acquired by SoftBank, so Arm was a public company.  It was dual listed on Nasdaq and the LSE in London. It was then acquired by SoftBank in 2016. I mean, that was a really interesting time because it was around the time of Brexit and so there were a lot of people that were thinking, okay, well there's no way the UK's gonna approve that deal.

As a matter of fact, Masayoshi Son was very, very smart in terms of how he went about that deal. So Masayoshi Son being the CEO of SoftBank, you know, he spent a lot of time working with the British government and that deal was basically put out there as okay. The UK, notwithstanding Brexit, the UK is open to business and is open, you know, for international business.

And so I think the SoftBank acquisition of Arm may not have got through the first time around, had we had a different sort of, you know, political landscape. We had a very, very unique landscape and I think that's one of the reasons why that deal got through. So fast forward to around 2020, Masayoshi Son decided that he wanted to start exploring options with Arm and Nvidia, as you know, the entity that we think made the most sense, who was interested, and so talks started with Nvidia. I was then pulled into that, so I was actually at the Vision Fund at the time. I wasn't a GC back then, but I was working on a number of sort of strategic things with Masayoshi Son, and the management team, they pulled me into that deal.

By that point, the deal, the rationale for the deal, was already done. It made sense to both Nvidia and SoftBank to get this done and it made sense to Arm. So my role was really around the execution, if you like. So we successfully negotiated a deal with Nvidia, and then we had this sort of long, attractive period between signing and closing as you often get on large complex international deals.

But during that particular period we had a lot of dealings with regulators in the UK, in Europe and the U.S. We always knew there was gonna be a challenge getting this deal approved. But we actually found it more challenging than we were expecting, and that was just dealing with those three jurisdictions, if you like.

That's before we got into China, and so it got to a point when, you know, in early 2022, I think it was, you know, both SoftBank and Nvidia decided to terminate that deal because it had become clear that the hurdles were just going to be too high to overcome. And it was at that point that Masayoshi Son decided to take Arm public, and given how closely I'd worked with Arm, I was always gonna play a part in that. But I actually ended up playing a much larger part than I thought because of the way things played out. 

JOHN QUINN: Right, so we talked a little bit about Arm and its products becoming increasingly important in the world of AI.

AI enabled chips, present on entirely different intellectual property. I mean, how do you go about capturing, you know, creating the intellectual property and capturing it and making sure that your designs and inventions are protected? That must be a project in itself. And I assume it's, there's a real thickness of intellectual property already in the AI world.

SPENCER COLLINS: Yeah. No, that's right. That is a huge project in itself, you're absolutely right and so we have a dedicated team working on it. When I took charge as General Counsel of Arm a few years ago, one of the first things I did was basically look at the level of invention and what we're actually, you know, what we're creating, what we're recording, what we're filing, what we're not, and why.

And it became very clear that we weren't doing anywhere near as much as we should have been doing in my opinion. And at the time, you know, AI was, you know, it was something that was out there but hadn't yet taken off. Chat GPT hadn't been launched, so we actually started to become a lot more proactive and so we set ourselves targets.

In terms of filings, we make sure that our engineers work incredibly closely with our patent, engineers and attorneys. We make sure that we capture everything that we can possibly capture. We also changed our advisors, we make sure that we are working now with advisors that understand the industry.

They understand what needs to be captured. They understand how best to capture it and they understand how best to protect us as an IP powerhouse. So there are a number of things that, you know, I wanted to do because I thought that we should be doing more as an IP company generally. But with the growth layer, that's only accelerated those efforts. And, you know, I think we've done a pretty good job getting up to speed. 

JOHN QUINN: I mean, we've heard about this, Stargate Project, a $500 billion project that SoftBank is working on with OpenAI with financing from among others or investment from among others from funds in the Middle East. What will the role of Arm be in the Stargate project? 

SPENCER COLLINS: Yeah, so as you mentioned earlier, Arm is 90% owned by SoftBank, and you know, Masayoshi Son is very focused on capitalizing on Arm’s opportunity within AI. So whilst, you know, SoftBank Open AI, Oracle will be working certain things, Arm will be going about its business in EU on a day-to-day basis, the way in which it does now. The interesting thing is there is going to be a huge need for power, huge need for energy ‘cause essentially what Stargate is, it's an infrastructure project, right? It's in the data center and Arm already has a, you know, good position, but huge opportunity, in that space, and I think Stargate is just gonna accelerate that.

JOHN QUINN: Masayoshi has been speaking for some time about wanting to be involved in data centers and creating enormous capability for electric power generation. It seems like that's finally materializing in this, the Stargate project. 

SPENCER COLLINS: That's absolutely right. I mean, look, Masayoshi Son has been focused on AI for a very, very long time. I mean, he's been calling this out for the longest time. It just so happens that, you know, Stargate is the opportunity that he's really catalyzing on and everyone's noticing, you know, his role in that. But AI is not something new to me. He has been, as I said, focusing for a very long time. If you cast your mind back to the creation of the Vision Fund, so as people will know, you know, the Vision Fund was a hundred billion dollar fund. It was the first of its kind, I think I'm right in saying that when it was launched, that $100 billion was a similar number to the entire number that had been invested in the year prior in the U.S. by all VCs in aggregate. 

So it was a huge play, a huge experiment. But the whole purpose of the Vision Fund from Masayoshi’s standpoint was to invest in the opportunity that is AI. So when the Vision Fund started, you know, you couldn't take a deal to the IC unless there was a meaningful AI component to it. Now, like most funds, you know, things have evolved and different opportunities present themselves.

Not all of that capital was deployed in AI. The point being made though, is Masayoshi has been focused on AI for a long time. I think he's very excited by the opportunity that OpenAI brings. And you know, he's thought about things and he knows that data centers are gonna be very, very important going forward.

It was a huge appetite for computers, the energy efficiency, how that plays to      Arm strengths and the ecosystem that Masayoshi has created. I think things have come together for him at the right time and, you know, he's hugely excited by the opportunity, as you would've seen, when they held the press conference with the President recently.

JOHN QUINN: Yeah. Could we talk a little bit about you? Your background and how you got to this really interesting position that you're in now. First, do you have a background in technology? Like a degree in electrical engineering or computer science? 

SPENCER COLLINS: I wish I did. No, I don't. I've always been involved in technology, you know, throughout my career.

So, you know, I worked in business before becoming a lawyer for technology companies. Then when I was a lawyer I was always very focused on tech practice. So I qualified as an M&A lawyer, at a law firm called Allen & Overy in London, quite a few years ago now and then I really got my break when I had a subcommon to Fairwick and West in the Valley.

So at the time, Allen & Overy had a huge global platform, not necessarily strong in the U.S. like most of the Magic Circle firms were in those days. And Fairwick and West had this amazing startup practice that was becoming more mature, did a great client base. You know, Facebook as it was then called, was one of their big clients.

They would become global and make acquisitions.  But Fairwick was very domestic in terms of its footprint, in terms of offices. And so it made sense to strengthen the relationship between A&O and Fairwick. And I was, for some reason chosen chosen as the right person to basically spend some time with Fairwick working on that. And that was great.

So I moved over to Silicon Valley, with my family and my very youngest at the time and my wife, and basically, you know, started working on only tech deals, most of which had a transatlantic element to them, but not all of them. And that really sort of gave me a springboard in terms of, you know, focusing on technology.

Then I came back to London and was a tech specialist, if you like. Then I joined, I was headhunted by a U.S. firm to really help with their sort of European tech practice. And it was at that point that I was actually seconded to the Vision Fund because the Vision Fund was just starting up, this was back in 2017.

The Vision Fund was just starting up, and I basically went in there with the common connection. I went in there as a secondi with the sole intention of basically converting them as a client and quite frankly, getting into equity rather than being a salary partner in the firm I was at. But I realized pretty quickly that this was a huge opportunity.

One that I wouldn't get again and I wanted to take full advantage of it. So I actually converted over on a full-time basis. Now, to answer your question, okay, well, do you have a tech or engineering background? I don't. But because I had been around technology for quite a few years, it actually worked very well in the Vision Fund environment because if you think about it, they were investing not in one particular sector of the tech space, it was across all parts of the tech industry. And so having a general understanding of technology was more beneficial for that role than having a deep hard tech understanding in one particular segment, which is, you know, what basically you need in order to be an engineer. I think for the SoftBank world, it worked very well.

I think from an Arm standpoint, you know, it is very focused in terms of what we do and quite frankly, you know, what did I do in order to get up to speed? Well, I worked a lot with Arm, which I'll come onto, when I was at Soft Back, and so I got a decent understanding of what the business did.

But then when I decided to join them full time, you know, I read around the subject, and I felt pretty comfortable. I knew what the business did, I understood the main issues, but, John, you know, being a General Counsel at a company like Arm, you know, it's much like being a litigator. It's very much a team sport.

So I've got, you know, I've got world class engineers that I can, you know, I can call on. I've got world class IP litigators, that I can call on. I've got world class IP practitioners internally that I can call on. So my role as the GC is, you know, the crews and the title. Right. I'm sort of a generalist.

I can call on the expertise that I need where it gets very, very specific. I've got a general understanding as a result of my background and the amount of time that I've spent working with or around Arm. And, you know,  I've never really approached the job as just a lawyer, I've always tried to add value beyond the legal channel and ultimately, you know, most problems that I deal with, they just need practical solutions. So most of what I do is basically navigate the sort of sensitive and difficult problems that impact our business, and you don't need to be an engineer to do that. In fact, it's probably better if you're not.

JOHN QUINN: Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. I think it's a handicap sometimes, to be too much in the weeds, in science, in the intricacies of electronics. What you really need is somebody broad gauge, with a liberal education and a lot of exposure to the business, which is what you had. It sounds like your preparation was perfect from the job you have and the decision to go from being a CKD to actually going to work for the Vision Fund, obviously in retrospect was a great decision.

You've hooked your wagon to a rocket ship it seems. Now General Counsel, a super successful, public company that everybody is watching. 

SPENCER COLLINS: Yeah, no. Look, I've been incredibly fortunate, you know. With your career, there comes a lot of luck and I've definitely benefited from that.

As I said, I joined the Vision Fund when it was, you know, in its early days. And back then, you know, I was focused on, I was based in London because the CEO of the Vision Fund was based in London. And so I was focused on and tasked with basically building up a European legal team, which is what I did.

But then I started to get involved in, you know, some of the biggest and more complex deals that they were working on. So, you know, I played a leading role on the $7.7 billion investment that we made in Uber. We took a large position in Nvidia, which I led on that too. Sold that one too early.

JOHN QUINN: What's it like? Everybody wants to know. What's it like working with Masa? 

SPENCER COLLINS: Working with Masayoshi, you know, it is always incredibly interesting. I mean, look, I've benefitted massively from working with Masayoshi. I mean, I've got a great relationship with him and he's treated me incredibly well. I mean, it took a long time to, you know, when I was working in the SoftBank ecosystem, if you like, to really get exposure to Masayoshi, because as you can imagine, you know, he's the king of the castle.

He's out in Tokyo, obviously and I was based in the UK. And it wasn't really until I started leading on those deals that I mentioned that I started to get the opportunity to work directly with Masayoshi because back, you know, pre COVID, the only people that really had a need to go to Tokyo were the most senior people in the fund, the CEO and a few of his lieutenants and I wasn't one of them. 

However, when I started to play, you know, a leading role in those big deals that I just mentioned, the CEO of the fund, so not Masayoshi at this point, basically sat me down and said, look, we want you to get on here, you're doing a great job, you've basically got two options. You should either move to the U.S. because that's where the volume of deals are, and we'll make you front and center the deals, or, you know, you can move to the investment side in the UK,  because you're pretty much doing that job anyway.

The safer route was to go to the U.S. and just continue, you know, being a lawyer and doing what I've done for a number of years, which is basically churn deals. However, I thought the opportunity to become an investor is not something that you get every day as a lawyer. And even if I stopped as an investor, which I probably did, I felt that the opportunity would basically improve my network, improve my skillset, make me a better advisor, and basically give me a seat at the table, at SoftBank, 'cause you're gonna be involved in more conversations. And it was as a result of being involved in those conversations that I started to get more exposure to Masayoshi. So my relationship with Masayoshi really started, when COVID hit.

Pre-COVID, you only really had the opportunity to travel to Tokyo if Masayoshi asked you to, and you know, Masayoshi asked certain senior people for obvious reasons. When COVID hit, however, Masayoshi obviously stopped traveling and started to use Zoom a lot more. And so I saw that as an opportunity to get exposure to Masayoshi that I didn’t have before. 

When I started working on those big deals that I mentioned, that got me more exposure and then at that point it was about this stage, Masayoshi wanted to set up a separate fund, which is focused on public securities, so the Vision Fund was investing in private companies. Masayoshi wanted to set up a new fund focusing on public securities.

And so I was asked to basically get involved in that, help set it up, help run it, and ultimately I became the GC of that fund. 

JOHN QUINN: That’s when I think I met you in Dubai. I think you were doing that job. 

SPENCER COLLINS: That's exactly right. Yeah. Great memory. We met in Dubai. I had to relocate over to Dubai because some of the investment was coming from the Middle East, and we thought that was a good place to be.

So, yeah, I lived in the desert for a while, helping set that fund up, and it was at the time that the Nvidia Arm deal kicked off. And so I was running that as well.

And then I would say it must have been around 2021 Masayoshi started to become more focused on Vision Fund again. And I remember this clearly, I was in my apartment in Dubai and he phoned me up and said, look, I want you to go back to the Vision Fund now, and this is what I'm now focused on again, but this time I want you to go back as a managing partner and this General Council fund. So that was obviously an incredible opportunity for me and I did that and moved back to the UK. So as a result of doing that, I was working more closely with Masayoshi and the Rajeev who was the CEO of the Vision Fund. Then, when the Arm and Nvidia deal, you know, basically took a step sideways, we decided to do an IPO. It was at that point that, you know, I was then appointed to work on the IPO and ultimately asked by Masayoshi to join Arm, to get the IPO done, and to start working at Arm because it was a very important part of the SoftBank portfolio. And that's what led me to Arm, so it's a very long way of answering your question.

JOHN QUINN: What's it like working with Masayoshi? 

SPENCER COLLINS: I would say that no two days are the same. It's incredibly interesting, I mean, he is certainly someone who will swing for the fences if he sees an opportunity. That's an understatement. That is a lawyer's description of it. You're right. It's an understatement.

No, he's given great opportunities. 

JOHN QUINN: Yeah. I mean, during the pandemic, I went to see him in Tokyo three or four times, and it was a process. I think there were like at least three,  you know, COVID tests that you had to take before you actually got to meet Masayoshi. Everybody knows Masayoshi as somebody who's a visionary and thinks very, very big.

You know, it might surprise people in that position and with Masayoshi's fame and accomplishments might come across as people with very big egos and personalities and he doesn't at all. Conversations with him, he always has a twinkle in his eye. He'll make statements that seem, you know, incredible,  about what he wants to do and what his ambitions are.

He's sincere about it, but he's open to hear. He wants to know what you think, is my experience with him. 

SPENCER COLLINS: Yeah, a hundred percent. A hundred percent. I mean, you're right. For someone that has the stature that he has, the success that he has, he's an incredibly humble guy, he's always listened to my advice.

He doesn't always agree with it, but that's the way it should be. He always listens to my advice and he's someone who has given me a lot of opportunities,  and I'm very grateful for those opportunities. It's been great. 

JOHN QUINN: What are the main challenges that you face that Arm faces, you know, from a legal standpoint in your job now, what's top of mind?

SPENCER COLLINS: I think it's probably the pace of change given, you know, the world that we now live in. And it's funny actually because I was, coincidentally, I co-chaired a GC dinner in Atherton a couple of weeks ago. Me and Jonathan, who's the GC over at Meta, cohosted that, and then this very topic came up and we had some of the market leading tech pieces in the room, obviously, excuse me. But we, you know, we had the GC of AMD, Broadcom, Google, Palo Alto Networks, Meta, Vista Equity Partners, and many, many more. And none of us really had the perfect answer in terms of how we deal with the problem, the pace of change.

So if I look at the semiconductor industry, which is obviously the industry that I work in, I don't think it has been more relevant and complex than it is now. And as a result, they're at the front and center of everything at the moment, from a regulatory perspective, geopolitical export control, I mean, the list just goes on and on. So that really impacts my job on a day-to-day basis in a very material way. You know, how we think about certain jurisdictions, how to navigate new legislation regulation that's coming to address those issues.

As part of my job role, John, I've also got government affairs reporting to me.  So I'm living and reading this stuff very much on a daily basis, and my view is, you know, you, you need to be able to navigate these issues very quickly and skillfully, particularly where you are under the lens of a public company because obviously, you know the world's looking at you, the market's looking at you, one footfall, and you could be facing public scrutiny, which is never a comfortable position to be in.

So from my standpoint, I think the key thing you need to have in your arsenal is, you know, flexibility. You've gotta be comfortable with thinking on your feet,  given everything that's going on in the world right now. I think the other thing though is you have to have, and I really learned this when I've moved to Arm and, you know, become a public company or GC of a public company, you have to have really strong advisors, they need to understand your industry. They need to understand the issues that are facing your industry. Because ultimately, you know, your job as a General Counsel or an internal advisor, quite frankly, is to provide advice and be meaningful. Advice from an external advisor. And you customize it. Your job is to basically wrap that up and customize it, in a way that applies to your business.

Adding the knowledge that you have of your business and the industry and the things you are dealing with, that task is made a whole lot easier when the advisor that you have advising you is the best out there. On the flip side, I think the role becomes significantly harder if you don't have the right advice.

So I think it's more important than ever right now to be working with advisors that are best in class. They really understand the industry that you work in. They really understand the business, and the only way they get to do that is to invest the time to do that. 'Cause I said before, I think, you know, the role of General Counsel is, you know, the clue is in the title.

You are a generalist, and so you need to know who to pick up the phone to, but you need that specific advice, from world class advisors and I don't think that's ever been more important than the world that we're operating in now. 

JOHN QUINN: Yeah, yeah. Pace of change, being flexible, trying to anticipate what's next.

Very, very difficult. I mean, just by one example, the regulation of AI means, that's something that over the last two, three years it has been top of mind and the debate wasn't about whether AI would be regulated, it was how much it should be regulated and how, and what would be the model. And then within the last 30 days with the Trump administration, I think we have a definite sense that's a dial that's gonna be dialed back.

You see a bit of a retreat in Europe. The European AI Act and the implementing regulations that they've kind of, at least for the time being, they've hit pause on those. So, it's just one example in our world, a legal rule about how things have just changed overnight. 

SPENCER COLLINS: Yeah, completely. I think, and what we've learned from that is to always basically take a step back and observe, rather.

So I'm always advising my team to, you know, you've gotta keep up with it. The current topics you've gotta keep on. You know, you've gotta look around the corners to use your phrase. You've gotta make sure that you are preempting what's gonna happen next, but at the same time, you don't shoot from the hip, you don't go too early because we're in a very interesting period geopolitically.

And to your point, when you've got an administration that's coming in, it actually starts to pull back in certain directions, you know, you need to make sure that you're getting it right. So my lesson from that, and my team's lesson from that is to be patient and be calculated, look around the corners and have an idea as to what's coming.

But don't shoot too early because we're in a very unpredictable period. 

JOHN QUINN: Thank you, Spencer. We've been speaking with Spencer Collins, Chief Legal Officer of Arm Holdings, who holds a fascinating job as a front row seat on a lot of the most important changes that are taking place in the world today. 

This is John Quinn. This has been Law, disrupted. Thank you for listening to Law, Disrupted with me, John Quinn. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe and leave a rating and review on your chosen podcast app to stay up to date with the latest episodes. You can sign up for email alerts at our website, law-disrupted fm, or follow me on X at JB Q Law or at Quinn Emanuel. 

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