Leadership In Law Podcast
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Welcome to the Leadership In Law Podcast with host, Marilyn Jenkins! Cut through the noise. Get actionable insights and inspiring stories delivered straight to your ears - your ultimate podcast for navigating the ever-changing world of law firm ownership.
In each episode, we dive deep into the critical topics that matter most to you, from unlocking explosive growth to building a thriving team. We connect you with successful law firm leaders and industry experts who share their proven strategies and hard-won wisdom.
So, whether you're a seasoned leader or just starting your journey as a law firm owner, the Leadership in Law Podcast is here to equip you with the knowledge and tools you need to build a successful and fulfilling legal practice.
Your host, Marilyn Jenkins, is a Digital Marketing Strategist who helps Law Firms Grow and Scale using personalized digital marketing programs. She has helped law firms grow to multiple 7 figures in revenue using Law Marketing Zone® programs.
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Leadership In Law Podcast
S03E136 Leadership, Humanity, & AI in Law with Rory O'Keeffe
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Legal leadership is most powerful when it sounds human. We sit down with Rory O'Keeffe, an Irish‑born lawyer who’s worked across criminal law, big projects, arbitration, and global tech, to unpack how in‑house teams move from being seen as blockers to becoming strategic guides. Rory’s journey reveals why curiosity beats certainty, how a blunt “no” kills influence, and why the best legal advice often looks like three clear options with honest tradeoffs.
We dig into real stories: the temptation to backdate a contract and how to stop it without blowing up the relationship, the moment a single acronym derails a meeting, and the quiet damage caused by clauses that always get negotiated down. Rory makes the case for coaching over mentoring, building psychological safety so teams raise issues early, and using practical playbooks to cut contract cycle times by 20% or more. He also shares his approach to cross‑functional trust, asking simple questions, translating privacy and cybersecurity into narratives leaders can actually use, and giving the C‑suite decisions they can own.
AI and legal tech are here, but the smartest teams choose tools with eyes open. We cover the questions every leader should ask before adopting new platforms: where the data lives, how it’s secured, what exit looks like, and whether the tool solves a real workflow problem or just looks good on a dashboard. As Rory puts it, AI won’t take your job, but a lawyer using AI will, so learn to leverage it without risking confidentiality or budget lock‑in.
Reach Rory here:
https://www.rmoklegal.com/
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We connect you with successful firm leaders and industry experts who share their proven strategies and hard law wisdom. So whether you're a student leader or just starting your journey as a law firm owner, the Leadership in Law Podcast is here to equip you with the knowledge and tools you need to build a successful and fulfilling legal practice.
Rory’s Squiggly Career In Law
SPEAKER_01Welcome to another episode of the Leadership in Law Podcast. I'm your host, Marilyn Jenkins. Please join me in welcoming my guest, Rory O'Keefe, to the show today. Rory is an Irish-born lawyer who's built a career across criminal law, business law, arbitration, and ultimately technology law. Originally from Dublin, Rory began his legal career in Wicklow before moving to London more than a decade ago, where he now advises scaling businesses and charities while raising his family in a richly multicultural home. What makes Rory distinctive is how he practices law. He brings board-level insight without the stiffness, translating privacy and cybersecurity, AI and commercial risk into stories that founders and leaders can actually understand and use. He blends governance and humanity with philosophy and practicality and a sharp legal mind with an unmistakable Irish sense of humor. Today we're talking about AI, legal leadership, and how in-house lawyers can move from being seen as blockers to becoming strategic gods in a data-driven world. I'm excited to have you here, Rory. Welcome.
SPEAKER_02Welcome. Thank you very much.
SPEAKER_01Tell us a bit about how you got here, your leadership journey, all of that.
SPEAKER_02I like to call it uh a squiggly career journey. So like snakes and ladders, if you if any of those who still know that game, it's a bit of some of it, like a lot of people would think, oh, well, it's the current generation, it's exactly the career path that they want, but maybe I was ahead of my time. I don't know. But I started, as you say, I started in criminal in what we call the Garden of Ireland, and it's because it's all green and it's luscious with mountains and such. But I did criminal law. So amongst that green, luscious, amazing, beautiful, picturesque scenes across Ireland, you've also got the sexual assault cases, you've got the manslaughter, you've got membership of the terrorist organizations at that point. We call it the special IRA. And yet all those court cases that would go into the High Court, the criminal appeals court, and Supreme Courts. So we had those, which is Baptism of Fire, I think, when I started in my career. But I think that really helped me understand objectivity within the legal professional, what's required for you to separate yourself from the emotional side of it. I know we all joke about lawyers not having any emotions or not having a heart, but it's necessary to maintain objectivity in order to give clear advice. And that was my first kind of learning experience, having to lead there also because my we call them at the time masters, it's quite archaic now. My master at the time was unfortunately diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He had to step away. So I had to step up. And I was very young, very green, very, but I have to admit that all the professionals, even though they were on opposite sides to me in adversarial positions from prosecution and also the judiciary, were aware and out of respect, they were super helpful to me in just navigating the rules. Not on the points of law, mind you. I wish they were, but they weren't. I still had to work hard for my clients, but I did know that sometimes I might stumble over a request to the judge, and the judge was going, I think you meant you needed this. And going, Yes, thank you very much. So it was super professional, but it required me to lead a lot earlier in my career than I had imagined. And then I was itchy because I wanted to know what big firms are all about and why they got different training to the rest of us. Because I'd done probate and conveyancing and property and civil litigation, but light litigation.
unknownOkay.
Lessons From Early Criminal Practice
Pivot To Big Projects And Arbitration
SPEAKER_02And so I went in and did MA for a period of time, realized, although I like it, I'm not sure it's for me. So then I moved into one of the biggest law firms for Ireland, which was in projects, energy, and construction. So I was doing things like motorways to bridges through to gas power plants to liquefied natural gas, wind farms, they were taking off at that point. It was, and then the offshore gas fields as well, which is on the north coast of Ireland. So there was a lot of work there, and then the financial crisis hit. So I was in construction. What happened to everybody in construction? All disappeared because there was no money and no banks, no nothing. So it was an interesting learning curve where the rug is taken out from under you and you suddenly have to pivot to something else. And that's where I landed in arbitration. So I had studied an arbitration and I had some insights which may be somewhat dangerous, but it was a learning curve in itself. So I moved to something where I then became an in-house lawyer. No, no other lawyers were there. I suddenly had to build my own practice there. And I knew something was up when I was walking around in a three-piece suit with the tie and the cufflinks. And when you walked down the corridor, people parted like they part in the seed. And I was I'm too young for this. What's going on here? And I realized only the CEO and anybody in the C-suite dressed up like that. Everybody else just dressed like normal human beings. And suddenly I was thrown in with this perception, and I was going, I'm not used to this. But then I realized actually you need to suck it up. That is the world now that you're moving into. That requirement to shape relationships, shape how I deal with other people, how I message things, because people could take things out of context quite quickly and quite easily. And then I shifted after that into the tech world because I thought the designed and build approach to constructing something was very similar to the tech world where you designed build, test, run. And that I that concept to me was very familiar to me. And I liked the idea that it was cutting edge, new technologies. It was very exciting to start in that world. And I started when we were all starting to talk about outsourcing, which was a hot topic many moons ago. I'm not going to date myself. And that required me to move up a different kind of working across a global company of Fortune 500, working up the ranks, and then building teams and supporting teams, and getting to a point where my team, I used to describe them, they don't mind it, but I used to say the gray haired team. Because they were super brilliant at the law, but also but what I found was that there was a necessity for everybody to just realize where your faults are, because maybe maybe it's just the style, maybe it's cultural shifts because you're dealing with global negotiations, so you have to shift to their style, not just your own style. It might be just you might some people might think things more personally than others, and you sort of it's nothing to do with that. I usually tell people don't be precious about your drafting, just don't be precious. It'll be butchered, and you'll never get to the most elegant, perfected contract in the world. What is a success is everybody leaves knowing that they know what the contract's about. They may not even have to look at it ever again afterwards because everybody successfully delivers and the client's happy at the end of the negotiation rather than the client feels like they've been put through a mill and they need a holiday. That's not the result you want. Right. So uh it's the a lot of people describe it as the yes and instead of yes, but that approach to delivering messaging and influencing correctly those who are in senior positions who have 30 seconds for you to explain, which I'm not doing very well in your question right now. But it's that kind of that building out those teams became like one or two reports, then it became 10 to 12 to 16. Then I move back into private practice, become a partner in a big law firm. Then I have another type of team and I have a different type of leadership and politics to navigate because you're dealing with a partnership, equity, and salaried and of counsel and consultants. And then you've got the tiers of lawyers behind who are super brilliant, super bright, super ambitious, but just need to be reined back, like on a hypothetical metaphorical leash before they get too excited and go too far too quickly. And that's exciting because you never have to question can they do the job? It's a question of how can I help you see your path to go further, faster, but effectively. That's hard sometimes to train people who are super bright and brilliant.
SPEAKER_01Well, that's that is such a no, that that's amazing. I love the the all the different pieces or the different types of leadership you had to grow into and then learn to work with different teams. And then, like you said, internationally as well. So your leadership journey really does cover a lot of different aspects of leadership and growing your teams. And then at the end, like you said, you're molding these people to be more successful because they already have the talent.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, they do. They do. And some people actually they've their confidence is probably some people their confidence is not strong enough because they don't realize just how good they are, and other people they're overly confident. So you need to bring them back a little bit before they go too far. And it's finding that balance where they find the answer themselves. So it's coaching. I seek to coach rather than mentor. I always think that mentoring is like giving people a map of how to get somewhere. Coaching is which map do you think you'd like to use yourself?
SPEAKER_01I love that distinction. Yeah, I love that distinction because you're right. I mean, in the law, and it's classic that you would be a mentor or a coach, one of the two, but it's kind of part of the part of the industry. So you can help bring people with you. I love that. So you've worked across all these different types of law, and these all these different teams. How did you how do you feel that helped you to shape the way that you see legal risk today when it comes to the type of uh law that you're practicing?
Becoming In-House And Leading Early
SPEAKER_02So I'm in the commercial tech space, so it's it varies. I think what I've learned, because I was in-house for quite a long time, about 10 years without one firm, one company, and it was global. I learned a lot about just because you're right doesn't make the solution right. And I explained that it in my head it's you can't be the department of no to be section-focused. You have you will not influence anybody when you're an in-house lawyer by just saying the law just says no. And I see that some more so with those who are very specialist feel. So when I was advising, advice solely on, say, for example, data protection, and that is it can be a super complicated piece because the nature of the data flows, the ropes, the international transfers, the legitimate interest that goes around it, you have to, there's so many variables, and you still have to figure out are we being told everything in relation to all these different pieces of technologies that are merging together to create what is a fantastic product that the business has come up with. And I find that some people take the no, we can't do that because that's too risky. And so, no, I remind people that it's not that you're wrong in the way you're approaching it. I think the way that they need to understand it is that you're the decision of whether you go ahead or not is not with the legal team, it's with the business, it's with the CEO, the CFO, COO, C whatever, right? Right. It could be whoever. But they are the ones that are going to put the money for something. They're the ones who decide what risk they're willing to take. Because they have a business plan, which you may or may not, depending on where you sit as a legal function, you may not have a seat at that table. So you may not know all the different variables that they're deciding, that actually weighing up the risks, it is better for us to do this. Now, there are obviously we're under ethical codes and we've got we're heavily regulated. So we have lots of reasons why we have to whistleblow, we have to raise our hand, we have duties, yes. But if none of those are being implemented impacted, shall I say, the next stage then is to say, okay, if they decide to jump off that bridge, then they get to decide it. Now the thing that you might have not realized is they're not stupid, they've got a bungee cord already latched to them, so they're totally fine, okay. And also, or maybe it's just a small creek, so they're just jumping into what is well-known areas. So you're you didn't have all the facts. So you need to be mindful that when you're presenting the veiled no, you need to have a yes, uh, as I said before, it's a yes and. So I like example of this, didn't quite it's not quite the same, but just it's I was finding something I I finded horrific at the time, was that I was very junior, I had somebody very senior in the sales, and they were trying to get this cell through with a government agency. They went off, they signed the document, they came and they handed it to me and said, It's all done, now you go process it. And I said So I was going, okay, let me have a quick look at this. And I said, Hold on a second, this is backdated. It's not the effective date, it was backdated. So I said, No, we can't do that. And they said, I'm not going back into that big government secretary and asking them to re-sign this. It'll be far too embarrassing. I said, I think it'll be more embarrassing if they're pulled up in front of a government committee to explain how they backdated a contract. And I think that's gonna be an issue for you and for me. And they said, and it was the back of my mind, it was one of those weird things that we've always been told you can't do. And I, for some reason, I drew a blank. It was like the silliness in my head. I was going, why is it that we can't backdate? I know you can't, but why what was the reason for this? This is and sometimes the most simplest of things throw me rather than come the most complicated things. And it was like, and I said, Okay, let me just see. Maybe I've got this wrong, or maybe this is okay, or maybe there's a law, or there's a rule, or something I don't know about. So I did a bit of checking across the legal team before I came back to this very important individual, and then I said, and everybody could say, it just has to be re-signed. So you rip it up and you re-sign with the correct date. I said, Okay, so I'm back in. And then this particular person said, I don't care what you're saying, Rory. I just don't care. You can ask me to do this, but it's just not gonna happen. I said, Okay, so I understand this as fraud. And he said, Don't use big words with me. And I said, That's five letters. Like you know where you're supposed to say it in your head, but I just said it out, and I was like, Oh no, I've just said it. This could be queer suicide, like I that could be the end of me in this company, but I just said no, and he said, Well, why? I said, And I did a yes and I said, Yes, you couldn't do it, and maybe you could make arrangements with the directors of the company as to when you might go visiting them in prison because it is a criminal offense as well. Okay, and he looked at me and he's going, I don't know if you're trying to be funny or not. I said, I'm actually not being funny, but I'm just trying to show you that if you want to do this, I need you to discuss this with the board of directors and explain to them why you're comfortable proceeding on this basis. And so I left the room, and a few days later, a new contract arrived on my desk, which was effectively thrown at my desk. No grace whatsoever. But the point was made. And I would hope that somebody along the way would understand that I was not just trying to save the company or the directors, but I've actually just trying to save his career in the process. But they don't see it at that point. But that's the that was I would and also anybody listening, I would not recommend anybody just trying to be so facetious, downright, silly to do those things. There's nicer ways of presenting this information. It was just that the ticket individual I was dealing with was quite people had one of those egos that that that was finded difficult entering through a room. So it was just that kind of scenario. But I that's what I just say is it's it's an interesting world we live in sometimes, having to influence in this way.
SPEAKER_01I think you're right when it's you when you talked about you can't be the department of no without an explanation. Sometimes, like you said, you don't know all of the deals or all the details of what's going on in the C-suite. So it's having that balance between, okay, no, you can't do this, it's because, or you could do this, coming up with a different solution.
SPEAKER_02It's the because, it's the why. You need to help them understand where you're coming from. I had a conversation with somebody about two years ago around it's AI and employment law and potential employment claims connected to an AI case. And we were both, we were saying I was concerned about bias, and this person was a data scientist, is also concerned about bias. And then we've we realized actually we're talking across purposes because their definition of bias is different to my definition of bias. And then we just said, hold on, stop. Can I can you just tell me what it is in your world? And I'll tell you what it is in my world because I've never heard this before. And became super productive then, once we stepped away from positional position and and became more collaborative and inquisitive, curious, which is what we should be as lawyers.
SPEAKER_01I think you're right. Whenever you transition into the technology side, so you've got all the other sides that you've worked with. When you come into the technology, that's a whole another language, another, like you said, definitions. And it's making that transition and then making it understanding the law and how that that plays through. You had said something about become instead of being gatekeepers being more guides, what mindship do you mind ship do you see that requires in your position is becoming that type of person?
Building Teams And Practical Contracting
SPEAKER_02I'd start with curiosity and courage to ask questions, even if it makes you look let's say it, dumb. Yeah. I pride myself in looking dumb. It's there was a person who I think it's was a global general counselor, then became CEO of a company in a global scale, and I always admired her for her positions around this. She always said that she would ask questions more than she would make statements. She just asked lots of questions all the time. She was always asking questions. And it wasn't because everybody approaches a lawyer with automatic trust. It's a bit like going to your your medical physician, your you automatically assume they have the knowledge to make those decisions. That's a given. Until they find out they don't like the answer, and then they might get a second opinion. So then that then all bets are off. But the idea is that she was always telling me she said she just asked lots and lots of questions. People use jargon all over the place, and one jargon that was used was SME. To me, that's small and medium enterprises. Right. And then in the tech world, it's a subject matter expert. And I was going through one meeting thinking, why are you talking about all these SMEs? Why are they cooking it? That doesn't make sense. I'm missing something. Then I remember what she said and went, could I just ask a quick question? When you say SME, what do you mean? And they've said it, I was like, oh, light bulb moment. Thank you. And then they realized because when most companies have company jargon that they love, like value systems with the three C's, the five B's, the 10 A's, the 16 Fs, whatever they've come up with, as their mantra to try and instill a cultural value system, which I believe is very important and it's it has real merit from a business value perspective. But even though I'm joking about it, I still think it's funny when people say, Oh, I'm gonna talk about the three C's. And it's like, oh, let me think. It's one of them courage, one of them collaboration, like communication. It's not a game, Rory. We don't need information. Oh, come on.
SPEAKER_01About oh my gosh, yeah. I mean, there's all these colloquialisms and jargon, like you said, in companies. And if they let that overtake a meeting when not everybody's on the same page, that does go to wasted time and wrong negotiations, yeah.
SPEAKER_02It's massive, and you can't use any AI tool to help you with that one because they just they don't know it either. They only as good as the data you feed. I think the guard the guidance is that if you want people to come to you, they need to feel that it's probably too much to say, but the psychological safety that they can come to you with the problem without being judged by the problem. So people come to me and they said, we've inadvertently sent out an email with an attachment which we shouldn't have sent with the with the email. And I'll say, okay. And so that's a breach of confidence, it's uncap liability in the contract. And I say, Oh, before you go apocalyptic on the result here, why don't we first go through the process that we have in place to recover that information? Information, talk to the other side, we'll tell the other client as well, we'll tell make sure we can try and contain this as quickly as we can, and then we'll see what we need to do after that. So that's it's not that we're going to point fingers now, because pointing fingers now is useless. It's important just to try and deal with the issue as it is stands, and then we can reflect later on. I had a client who came to me once and there was something simple where they had a receptionist had released financial information of an individual to the individual's spouse. And we said, okay, but they had been divorced. So there was, and there was no, and it was personal information. So even if there was a spouse, they wouldn't have been entitled to that information anyway. And everybody said, Oh, we should fire the receptionists. And I said, Well, is that the correct result? Or is it down to the training or the lack of training that you were that you should have in place in order to protect? And also the question was, how can a receptionist get access to that information through your system? What kind of parameters do you have for user access? And what sort of ring fencing do you do within your system to prevent people from accessing such confidential information? They're just questions. Yeah. Questions, loaded questions, I might add, but they're questions that allow people to say, oh, hold on. We're not completely in the clear here. It's and are we taking it just being reactive to a situation rather than stepping back and looking at the bigger picture? So when I want to think of that is that you do need to put parameters in place, you put the policies, you put the compliance, you test the tools, you test to make sure it's in line with requirements, you do all of those things. Once they're in place, then it's a question of guiding people to an answer that you think might be the right answer, but then you get information, then you pivot to the next guide, the next route to find another answer that might work. And sometimes you might have five options on the table, but only two of them make sense commercially, operationally, and legally. So then you look at those two and then you present those two then to the C-suite and they make a decision. Happy days. And even if you don't like the decision, it doesn't matter.
SPEAKER_01Not your decision. Yeah, exactly. It's their C-suite decision to make. Wow. Very interesting. No, you're using AI now. You're using generative AI. Are you using it in contracts, marketing copy? I know that we do it in for inspiration for copy and that sort of thing. What doing that, what legal implications are most often over overlooked?
Coaching Over Mentoring
SPEAKER_02Security. So security of the data. So I think there's a lot of people they need to interrogate where is the data being used and stored. So there's thousands now of legal tech out there that promise the world guarantee, lots of things. I always say invest with care, invest with your eyes wide open. Okay. And that just basically means that just because it's shiny, I used to call it a shiny object syndrome, shiny dashboards, amazing. Does all gives you all this information? Is that really what you want? Is that how you're measuring success? Is that what you really need? Because if you're not doing, if you outsource all your litigation, for example, to a law firm and but you do everything yourself, then do you really need a case management tool? You know, is it really going to give you a lot? If you are dealing with a thousand NDAs in a month and your legal department is inundated just looking, even if it spends five minutes trying to clear an NDA and an N NDA times five, thousand times five, it's a lot of time wasted. Could you do a self-service kind of approach for your internal teams? And that's the kind of the that's the thought. And then once you have the uh requirement, what you're trying to solve for, then start looking for the tool that you want to use. Then ask the questions: what is the security around this? Where is it stored? Most likely cloud. Where is the cloud in this? No, we're not talking about in the sky, by the way. We all know this come share everybody in your podcast. We're way beyond that now. But it's is the data center in Frankfurt, is it in Los Angeles? Is it in Buenos Aires? Where is it? And also what's the fallover position if that center goes down?
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_02So is it within town, is it within cities, within country, where does it go? Because you want to know is it staying within the EU, is it staying within the US? Is it going, is it going to India, is it going to China? What is the where is your data going to be stored and how quickly can you retain that backup back in? The other question I usually ask for people is transition at the end. So we call it tech debt. So are you going to be locked in with this piece of technology forever because it's going to be far too complicated to move to something else? That's a problem because your price point is going to get even higher and higher as inflation and all those pressures year on year emerge. And as you just get sidetracked and say, I'm not going to go to something else because it's too difficult. You need to understand how easy would it be to withdraw from this product and go to another product that'll be a better price point because it makes it easier for you when you go start negotiating when they say we need to increase it by 10% or something like 10%, because I can easily go somewhere else and they can they'll only charge me an extra 2%. Why would I stay with you? That's a better conversation, not that I'm encouraging it all the time, but it's a better conversation to manage your in-house budget and to show that you're managing your in-house budget than to say, I'm stuck with it. So where else can I pull from in order to keep this one going? That's not a healthy position because you're not actually then potentially aligning with the business strategy, which requires you to pull in some new staff members, but you can't, because you spent it all on a nice shiny piece of tech that you're not really using 100%.
SPEAKER_01I love that. Evaluating what you are using and because a lot of the tech tech pieces would get you locked in. So it is more painful to move than it is to stay with them. So yeah, it's kind of part of the software industry as well.
SPEAKER_02Yes. Yes.
SPEAKER_01Yes, exactly. So looking ahead, what skills do you think define the most effective in-house legal leaders now that we've got a lot of AI and data we're dealing with? What skills would you look for?
From Gatekeepers To Guides
SPEAKER_02The starting is the same as we've been saying for the last few years: emotional intelligence, emotional resilience. I think the generations coming through now demand more from leadership than ever before. So it's not a kind of school system approach where you just dictate and then the child must follow whatever you ask them to do. That's gone.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So you the ability, the flexibility, the awareness of people and being more invested in them rather than just looking at the bottom line is what they're requiring from their leaders. The other part is just having greater trust within your teams. If you've done the due diligence on the onboarding, the hiring, and then the onboarding, the training, you've put all that time and expense in, then you need to let them breathe as they're growing and to make those mistakes, to have those safety nets in place, and to ensure that as a leader, people will come to you first rather than, or through the structures that you've put in place, rather than waiting. The one thing I always was really worried about was knowing that something had gone wrong, but they're not afraid to tell you, or it's going to take too long to go through that tree or organizational chart before I hear it. And that's the that's you want to hear it quickly. You want people to have the courage to tell you, not their gripes, their complaints about I wanted to have nicer coffee in the coffee machine. No, thanks. We can put that in the employee survey or something like that. It's I'll probably have the same, I'm quite particular about coffee too, but let's prioritize here. But there are times when people say the thing that I would like to hear things like, we've been consistently having problems with this particular clause that we've insisted on including in our contracts. All of our clients hate it, we're always negotiating. It takes us an extra day, two days, and then we have to escalate. And you don't hear about this because they because you get a lot of people just say, Oh, it's amazing, it's wonderful, thank you very much. You go, no good to me. I want to know. Because if I think that then what is the fallback position that we're always agreeing? Why don't we start with that then as our starting positions? That and they'll say that's why would we do that? And so because if I've got 10 people all negotiating that one clause and it's taking them three hours each, 10 times three is 30 hours. If I can take 30 hours away to save the company time, plus the sales teams get the deal done faster, the contract cycle is then reduced from say 50, it would take you like uh we've reduced the contract cycle time by 20 to 25%. There is a saving, not just from a cost perspective, but also on people's time, effort, and enjoyment. So why wouldn't I want to know? But it's trying to get that that in place, that culture in place, is something I think is part of the leadership skills that are definitely needed.
SPEAKER_01It seems to come back, every story you're telling, everything you're talking about, leads back to humanity and common sense, making it easy, having the conversations. You all know your positions, you know what you need to do, but is the communication and just the humanity in the in between?
SPEAKER_02Yes, and people are, and they're all people.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Just remember they're people. I know we will introduce the AI tools, and I say, yes, I keep telling people AI won't take your job as a lawyer, but a lawyer using AI will. So you have to use.
SPEAKER_01Yes. Yeah, agreed. This has been really good. I really enjoyed the conversation today. I know my listeners may want to reach out to you. Where would be the best place for them to connect to with you and learn more about you?
SPEAKER_02Um, the easiest I'd say is on LinkedIn. I'm looking for Rory O'Keefe, 2Fs, uh, from the south of Ireland, that's spelling, rather than the one F. And then they could also find me on the webpage, which is for my company, RMOKLegal.com. Or you can find me on my podcast, Beyond the Fine Print. But either way, I'm very happy to uh speak to whoever and just keep conversations going. If it's got goes nowhere fast, I'm always a chatty person. I think it's part of the Irish blood. That's all we do.
SPEAKER_01Love that. Love that. I uh we'll make sure these are in the show notes. And again, thank you so much for being here. This has been lovely.
SPEAKER_02Pleasure. Thank you, Marilyn.
SPEAKER_01Thanks for joining me today for this episode. As we wrap up, I'd love for you to do two things. First, subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss an episode. And if you find value here, I'd love it if you would rate it and review it. That really does make a difference in helping other people to discover this podcast. Second, you can connect with me on LinkedIn to keep up with what I'm currently learning and thinking about. And if you're ready to take the next step with a digital strategist to help you grow your law firm, I'd be honored to help you. Just go to LawmarketingZone.com to book a call with me. Stay tuned for our next episode next week. Until then, as always, thanks for listening to Leadership in Law Podcast, and be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts so you don't miss the next episode.
SPEAKER_00Thanks for joining us on another episode of the Leadership in Law Podcast. Remember, you're not alone on this journey. There's a whole community of law firm owners out there facing similar challenges and striving for the same success. Head over to our website at LawMarketingZone.com. From there, connect with other listeners, access valuable resources, and stay up to date on the latest episodes. Don't forget to subscribe and leave us to review on your favorite podcast platform. Until next time, keep leading with vision and keep growing your firm.