james-taylors-studio-hj5fj_james-taylor-may-27-2024-001.txt
James Taylor (00:08)
John Craske is the director of innovation at CMS, an international law firm with offices in over 40 countries. He is responsible for innovation and knowledge functions at CMS with the aim of helping their clients and businesses to work smarter and to find the right balance between client satisfaction, cost effectiveness, profitability, and opportunities for their people. John leads CMS’s dynamic legal innovation, legal operations and project management, legal tech, managed legal services, and knowledge teams.

He’s passionate about fostering a culture of innovation and encouraging people to be curious, ask questions and experiment. Currently, he’s leading the firm -wide AI strategy at CMS as they look at AI to supercharge their digital transformation program. In his role, John regularly works with clients and others in the legal industry to help design, implement practical and innovative solutions to their challenges. He loves hearing about specific legal and business challenges.

that clients have and then trying to solve them. And John, welcome to the SuperCreativity Podcast.

John Craske (01:09)
Thanks James, lovely to be here.

James Taylor (01:11)
So share with us what’s going on in your world just now, what currently has your focus.

John Craske (01:15)
Well, thanks for the intro. Yeah. I think the focus at the moment is working hard on our AI strategy roadmap. But secretly, I think we’re using that to help kickstart the digital transformation innovation journey for all of our lawyers. That’s been quite hard in a law firm when I think probably if I’m being unkind, I would say we’ve been using our computers more like electronic typewriters for many years. So it’s great to sort of be secretly using that to help drive it.

James Taylor (01:45)
Well, we’re definitely gonna get into the AI piece, we’re gonna get into the genesis of AI piece as it affects the legal industry. Just let everyone know, my wife is a lawyer and a solicitor, so I’ve been getting a kind of a bit of a seat to see how that world is transforming with some of my legal clients as well. But let’s just take you back, how did you get into this work you do? Did you come from the legal profession before that or from the technology background?

John Craske (02:09)
Yes, so I’m a qualified lawyer. I’m actually a Scottish Solicitor, even though being English, so I live up in Scotland. I know you do too, James. And I’ve always been interested in that sort of junction between the practice of law and the business of law. But a long time ago, my wife told me I need to do something a bit more creative and she didn’t mean painting or music, although I do love music. And then I think it was a series of…

lucky accidents maybe that everyone’s careers a bit like that so you know I had a boss I didn’t get on with so well we did a merger with Anderson Legal and then a de -merger with Anderson Legal when the Enron Scramble happened and then another things like that and so I’ve just kind of taken the opportunities when there’s been moments of change to get into that why are we doing things the way we’re doing it and I’m also always been that person in the room who asks the stupid questions and

why are we doing it like this? And that’s kind of led me down the path that I’ve gone down.

James Taylor (03:10)
Now, a lot of my legal clients have innovation departments, innovation labs. I was speaking the other week for a law firm. They had an innovation week to help their partners and their associates and their administrators kind of focus around legal tech and innovation. Tell us about the development of the innovation department within your business. How did that get started? How did it start to develop over time?

John Craske (03:40)
Sure, so I think we started probably a good long time ago. I mean, we’ve always been interested in using technology to help us be as efficient as we can be, both for our clients benefit, but also because the more efficient we are, then obviously the more profitable we can be like every other business. So for both of those reasons. But…

think the lawyers find it quite difficult to get involved and think about how they can use technology themselves. It’s almost like they would want somebody else to do it for them or provide it for them or innovate to them and then maybe that’s something we can come back to a bit later. So we started off quite gently. We did lots of work around legal project management and helping people think about

how they might structure their work in a sort of more innovative way. But then we realized we had a sort of missing gap and we were talking to all of the practice groups about innovation and what does the future of their work look like and how they’re gonna develop in the future. And actually they almost universally then said, that’s great John, but what tech have we got? And…

and so we were like okay no we’re not really here to talk about technology that might well be a way that you can use you can use technology to help you innovate but that’s not what we’re here to talk about and they’re like yeah well we’ll get to that our clients are demanding to know what technology we use so what tech have we got so that’s when we built out our legal tech capabilities and built our portfolio of tools that we’ve got and then moved on from there and actually we’ve always whilst we’ve always been sort of nudging away at the

core innovation piece, it’s only relatively recently when we’ve been able to go back and say, okay, well we’re back to talk to you about innovation. And still they say often, well what tech have you got? And we’re like, okay, well we’ve got a good answer to that now, we’ve got a team that can help you and we’ve got lots of tools. We really want to help you think about what ideas you’ve got for the way you deliver your work, what services you deliver and stuff. So we’ve incrementally grown the team out and it’s been a bit like a guerrilla war as well. So.

messages from the top and infiltrating from the bottom as well.

James Taylor (05:58)
Now there’s this tension that often exists in legal firms and accountancy firms, audit firms, where as a lawyer, you’re often thought to, you think in billable hours or five, 10 minute chunks. You’re always having to do your, I know lawyers have to do their time sheets and they’re thinking about that and the files and everything as well. And innovation obviously doesn’t work in that way. It kind of works in a slightly different way where we sometimes have to step away from the problem, kind of think from different perspectives, do a lot of research.

That takes time, that takes resources to do that as well. So how have you worked with the people within the business in order to get them to think about really innovation and the value of innovation as a concept and something that they should do, rather than it’s like, well, this is a compliance thing or you think about innovation from that perspective.

John Craske (06:50)
Yeah, sure. It’s actually, funnily enough, it’s every six minutes. Well, most law firms, it’s every six minutes rather than five or 10 because it’s a neat divider for the hour because you get 10 of them in an hour, right? But you’re absolutely right. It’s one of the key drivers in the law firm is this sort of need to record every six minutes of your day. And actually, most lawyers, certainly in private practice, will have targets around the number of…

billable hours or billed hours that they have to achieve in a year and if they don’t achieve those targets then they don’t get their bonus. So you know, we all know you get what you measure and so that’s what the lawyers do of course is that’s why they were driving. So we’ve done a number of things. The first thing is we’ve started at the bottom and we’ve made sure that innovation is in everybody’s competencies and that the people understand it’s part of their job.

Now, that’s only a beginning. We also try and do some training around things like creativity. I actually heard somebody once say to me, I’m sure you’ll disagree with this, but I heard someone say to me that, you can’t train creativity. But I don’t think that’s true at all. I think you absolutely can. But probably the, you know, one of the most interesting thing we did was introduce this concept called innovation hours. And I managed to convince the management team that.

This would be a valuable way of demonstrating to both the firm and to our clients that we took innovation seriously. So the way they work is if someone’s got an idea, think of it like seed funding for ideas and if they’ve got an interesting idea that they want to pursue then they can say, hey I’ve got this idea, this is what it’s about and can I have a budget of hours? And so then they kind of get a budget for hours the same way they would get a budget of hours if they were working on a client job. So…

and then we would support them with either help accessing tech if they need to do that or with the creative process if they need that or connecting them with other people around the firm or externally to try and experiment with their idea. Importantly I guess that the hours aren’t contingent on whatever it is being successful, it doesn’t matter, it’s more about them getting into the zone of trying some things out. So over the years we’ve had an increasing number of

innovation hours projects. And as I said, it’s partly symbolic. Of course, it’s partly practical because it gives people hours that count towards their target, but it’s also partly symbolic because it shows the way that that’s important for the firm.

James Taylor (09:32)
And how do you link that in terms of the strategy of the firm as well? So let’s say you have a partner or associates or people within the marketing functions of a law firm and they want to, they have maybe an idea of a problem they want to try and solve or an opportunity you want to look at. So they need to think in an innovative way. How do you then basically maybe build a team around this? How do you ensure that it is in alignment with what you’re trying to do as a firm? So it’s maybe has wider.

applications across the firm, so it has maybe a bigger impact. And then how do you go to that next stage where maybe you’re going from say a prototype of an idea to actually it being reviewed and saying actually this is something that we can give more additional resources to.

John Craske (10:16)
I think we try and start early and just help and the short version is and then just iterate around it to try and improve it, make it better, improve it, make it better. Each of the practice groups, so the legal departments in the firm has got a partner who’s responsible for innovation and they tend to have a group around them of lawyers who are interested in it and so we try and cultivate that and often…

the ideas for innovation project will come out of those groups not exclusively sometimes they come from someone who just got you know and and and idea to help solve the real pain point for them or for their clients and but we really trying support each person as they come through but we don’t try and do it for them i think that’s been quite an interesting journey that we’ve been on in and it in as i said earlier we quite often get the lawyers wanting us to innovate for the more to them and actually

that may be a bit like parenting. You can’t do that for them. You have to kind of do enough to support them and help them along the way, but you can’t do it for them. They need to learn themselves. And then, depending on what the idea is, we will either extend the project or iterate again around it. And then there’s been a few of them which have ended up being sort of market -facing things that we’ve launched, or just as many which are internal things about efficiencies or improving things for teams.

James Taylor (11:42)
Now, whenever you start talking with lawyers about innovation, the first term that usually comes up is artificial intelligence. How are we going to implement AI and what we’re going to do? How is it going to make us more productive? Is that a threat? Are we going to get rid of all these paralegals that we have in our law firms just now? So tell me, in terms of your personal approach to artificial intelligence, where do you see the biggest opportunities in the short term for firms like yours? And then maybe what are you a bit more excited about?

in the medium to longer term around AI.

John Craske (12:14)
Yeah, so I mean, I think it’s captured the imagination of people in a way that lots of other technology has never had, has before, at least I’m starting to sound like a beer advert if I say it quite like that. But the, yeah, and I think that’s been brilliant because we’ve, for one of the first, which is why we’re using it as a lever to help drive the digital transformation, because for the first time people are coming to us and saying, hey, how could I use this? Or what can I do with this? Which is really exciting.

I think there’s loads of opportunities to work with the technology to improve the way that we work. I think it’s really, really actually fascinating because people do say, well, what’s going to happen with our particularly junior resource and whether that’s paralegals or junior lawyers. And actually, I think…

The key, and people at work who are bored of me hearing me say this now, I think the key is to think about this sort of human plus machine. And I know from watching some of your stuff, James, that this idea of working on the human bits is something that you’re passionate about as well. But I think what we need to be doing is we need to be thinking about the future. So right now we can be using AI in what we do. And that can improve the efficiency of what we do. And we’re doing lots of experiments with AI.

things and we’re trying out a bit of a portfolio approach on lots of tools. So we can do that now, but we need to be thinking also about the longer term, about how are people going to be working in the future and what skills will they need to work with the machine, so the plus bit, but also what are the human skills that they’re going to need to make the best, do the best job. There’s also a bit of a thing around foundational skills. And this is not just law, but if machines are going to be doing

what our junior people are going to be doing. We still need senior people. We still need senior doctors, chefs, lawyers, whatever it is that, you know, where some of the stuff might be being done by machines. But how do you get to be a senior person if you’ve not been the apprentice, if you’ve not learned the basic skills? So we’re still going to, so those people are still going to be needed in the system. So I’m not worried about, you know, major like losses of jobs in the legal industry.

I think there is going to be major change in the legal industry though in terms of the tasks that people do. But I think that people will, so we’re going to need to think very carefully about how we build those foundational skills, legal skills in our case, into people and all the way through from university through to when they’re training in a law firm and then getting experience on jobs. But I think we’re also going to have to think about those human skills. So human skills, things like empathy and emotional intelligence and creativity and curiosity.

and those things that make us fundamentally human. I think actually we’re going to paradoxically we’re going to need those things even more in the relatively medium to medium to longer term, maybe not immediately. And that’s going to be an interesting thing, as I think as a, you know, for law firms, for industry, for humans, I think it’s really fascinating.

James Taylor (15:30)
a few years ago in California, I used to live in California and there was a young gentleman called Robert Huang and Robert trained as a computer scientist first of all learning about AI and then he went and trained as a lawyer. I’m not quite sure why you would go from being a software engineer to a lawyer, it’s kind of unusual, I can see you maybe going the other way but so he went trained as a lawyer and his early years as an associate he realized how mind -numbingly boring a lot of legal

work is, especially if you’re doing due diligence and certain things, and he said there must be a better way of doing this. So what he would do is, during the day he would do his legal work, and at night he went home and he basically programmed and worked on AI programs to replace himself. That’s really what he was doing, and by the end of the year he’d essentially replaced himself by building out different tools and functions to do that, and then being entrepreneurial he went and started a new type of law firm called, I think it was called Robot, Robot and Huang.

and there were three partners. Two of the partners were AIs and one of the partner was him as the human. And one, I think Darya, she specializes in AI, but specialized in litigation. And the other one specialized in mergers and acquisitions, I seem to remember. And what I find interesting about that is what then the human, what he was doing in his role. And it was exactly what you were speaking about there. It was the, the creator work, the curious work, the strategizing, empathy, building, building that relationship with clients.

so much of the kind of softer things that we don’t think, while the machine was able to do what is better doing at a tactical level as well. And certainly a lot of my clients, that’s what I’m seeing a lot of them using that for the first level is amazing for discovery, amazing for being able to send an algorithm across all of your legal agreements to say, hey, there’s this new Brexit has just happened or something has just happened. What is the risk factors to all of our legal agreements that we have with our clients just now?

and it pulls up that. So there’s obviously great things there as well. And I don’t know whether you’re seeing this in some of my clients, I’m seeing what traditionally was, let’s say, a 30 page contract, because some of these firms are using AI now, and on both sides are using AI, we’re now seeing 100 page contracts, because the AIs are kind of adding things that maybe the human wouldn’t necessarily have thought about adding before.

John Craske (17:47)
Well, I think we’ve seen the trend of contracts getting longer and longer for a good while actually. And I’m not sure it’s AI that’s driving that. It’s a mix of the world just being more regulation, more uncertainty, more volatility, all sorts of things and complexity that’s going on in the world. But you’re right. And I do wonder whether actually they will go over a peak and then they’ll start getting shorter again because they’ll only put in the contract the things that you really need. Who knows? But yeah, absolutely. We’re…

when we’re seeing AI helpers, you know, summarize meetings and actions, coach you in your email with your drafting with your, you know, like your sidekick. But it is really interesting to think about the mode in which people are using it because actually quite a lot of lawyers are good at delegating. So delegating to a more junior lawyer to do that or paralegal to do a task, but not so good at sort of

co -creating and working with and a lot of the interesting challenges around AI especially around the sort of edge of where AI is capable today and of course that edge is moving out all the time. It’s not universally good at every task and one tool isn’t universally good at every task so but so when you’re on the edge of the capabilities you need to be working with it not delegating to it. So if something is very capable then you can delegate to it but if something you know and

and there’s a lot of noise in the world around hallucinations of generative AI but if you’re working with something then actually a lot of those risks around hallucinations go away because you’re using it, you’re working directly with it to help you in your work process, whatever that is. So yeah, I think that’s going to be really interesting to watch.

James Taylor (19:36)
I know within the world of management consulting, there was a study done the other day by Harvard University and Boston Consulting Group, where they gave a bunch of their consultants access to a generative AI. And it was interesting just seeing how, I think it increased productivity by 40%, the task was judged to be, I think, 12 % better in terms of quality. But what I thought was interesting about it was that you had these two groups in particular that really excelled, and they were called Cyborgs and Centaurs. So, yeah.

John Craske (19:44)
Yeah, that’s exactly it.

That’s right, exactly that, that’s what I’m referring to.

James Taylor (20:04)
Yeah, so the Centaurs were what you were kind of talking about a little bit there, where you would look at a project or a task and you would say, okay, these are the things that the AI, I’m going to give to this AI to do this particular task, and these are the things that I’m going to reserve as humans. Whereas the cyborgs, and they were almost intertwining everything that they were doing with AI. It became like a guitar player would have a guitar, or, you know, it just became an extension of themselves. And that is the kind of more that, that kind of co -pilot thing kind of going on. It’s more collaborative in nature.

John Craske (20:35)
i think that’s exactly right and that’s the same study of referring to them to read if any of the listeners are wanting to get that it’s called the navigating the jagged edge of a i a that’s a harvard business review article and within that they they collaborated with boston consulting group is worth reading the whole thing but actually that nothing cyborgs and sent or this is like almost like a a footnote in appendix seven or something is right at the very end and but i think it’s one of the most interesting nuggets in the whole thing and

James Taylor (20:58)
Ha ha.

John Craske (21:04)
If I’ve got time, my daughter, if she ever listens to this, will be embarrassed about me telling you this story. So I read that and I didn’t really absorb it. And then just over Christmas time, she was doing some homework, or before Christmas, she was doing some homework at the kitchen table and I was cooking. And she was writing an essay, a critical essay on a book they’d been reading in class, which is, it’s another twist in the tale. It’s a book about female empowerment, about…

Oliver Twist’s sister that you’ve never heard about before and and and she had chat GPT open and she had a word processor open and she was Working with it in the way you described like playing a guitar So she didn’t go chatgy page chatgy PT write me an essay about this book You know the way that we’re all worried about people cheating on exams or whatever with generative AI She just didn’t do that. She was like she’s the right route a bit and she went. I’m not sure about some words

Hey, can you give me some words that mean this or describe that? And then she wrote a bit more and then she said, not sure about that paragraph, copied that paragraph into chat. Can you help me rewrite this? And she was backwards and forwards all the way through. And so she produced something which was probably, she produced something quicker and probably better than had she written it herself, but she didn’t just delegate the task to the AI. And I think that was for me a real, a real light bulb moment about how we should be.

talking to our people about how they should be using AI at the moment, especially at that jagged edge of AI where it’s not universally capable at that thing. So forgive me for the story, James.

James Taylor (22:38)
No, but I think it’s great as well. I mean, obviously that generation is coming through now. A friend of mine, Mark Prensky coined the term digital natives and you know, very much. And actually her generation is way beyond that. They’re AI natives. You know, they’re using these tools in slightly different ways. My wife who’s been in law for a long time, she hadn’t really been using many of these tools. And I just kind of sat down with her one day and she was having to…

John Craske (22:46)
Yeah, totally.

James Taylor (23:05)
review a new piece of legislation that’s currently going through the courts, going through the Scottish Parliament around food. I think it’s called the Good Food Bill or something around food. And it was amazing because what she was able to do was to pull in all these different studies from different places, feed it in, and then it was about the quality of the questions that she was asking, in this case, to chat GBT, to help her think about how to term something, how to kind of use the language, in this case, of the…

the Scottish government to kind of refer back to what she was wanting to do, her target, her goal with this particular thing. And it was like that, I was saying, and you could see her, it was the first time I’d really seen her eyes kind of go sparkle because she’d, I didn’t realize I could use it in this way. I just thought, I didn’t realize I could use it as that type of collaborator. So it’s not too late for everyone. If you’re kind of coming to this a little bit later in life and you’re not a youngster, then there’s lots of opportunities here.

John Craske (24:03)
Yeah, totally. And that’s why I talk about human plus machine. Because so you’re now, that sort of prompting skills we’re talking about is that plus bit, right? So you have to work how to work with it as well. But you still need the human questions and things. So you need to be able to ask them. So yeah, I think it’s lovely when we start to see that, whether it’s at home or at work and people exploring it. I think it’s great.

James Taylor (24:30)
And then your own journey as a lawyer working within innovation as well, was there a key insight or a light bulb moment in your life and you work your own creative journey?

John Craske (24:43)
I think when I realized, I mean I’ve always been interested in this junction between the practice of law and business and law, but when you described doing due diligence as really boring, I was a real estate lawyer so I was just doing lots of occupational leases, which for those of you if you’re not a lawyer means…

if you ever get a shopping center and all of the units in their elect every one of those got a leak behind it and the whole framework documents of such a doing those all day and there’s only so many occupational leases i think i could could do and and so i’d and that my wife and saying to me that i needed to do something more creative is probably the real sparkle and what led me down this that this path i think this many light bulb moments all of the all the time though i think it’s

you know so i i’d wanted home just a couple weeks ago and i bought myself a new saxophone because i’ve never i’ve always wanted one i can’t play the saxophone it’s not very well yet but i have played the clarinet for ages and the guy in the music shop he was like olivander honestly matching instruments and things to people but i’ve been playing my clarinet with the same mouthpiece i’m fifty one now so it must have been for forty years with the same mouthpiece and he went

you’re on beginners mouthpiece what you want is one of these and so he sold me a new mouthpiece a bit of plastic only at you know 100 pounds or whatever it was and you think 100 pounds for a mouthpiece and I played it and it was like it was like the clouds parted and the sun came out so you know so that idea of having the right kit and knowing your as part of knowing your craft and things because you know people always say that it’s about the kit but of course it’s not it’s this join between the person the human and the

kit and knowing how to use it whatever you’re doing so yeah there’s a there’s a personal one and a work one.

James Taylor (26:36)
Yeah, that reminds me a little, we had a guest on the show a little while ago, Professor Roger Neybone, who’s the world’s leading expert on experts. He wrote a book all about experts and he’s a surgeon originally. And he talks about this idea of a mise en place in French, you know, if you’re a chef, you have certain tools closer by because these are the ones you’re using all the time. Well, you might have other ones a little bit kind of further out of reach because you’re not using those so often. It’s that distinction of being able to know which tool to use in the right way, in the right order for the right

right thing and that adds, you know, that adds a little bit of distinction from someone that’s just an amateur in what they’re doing to actually someone who’s a professional and more skilled and more expert at it as well. Let’s get into some final quickfire questions before we finish up here. First of all, is there a quote that you live by that kind of a guiding light for you in your life?

John Craske (27:29)
I don’t think I’m a big one for quotes or sound bites, but I do firmly believe that you get out what you put in. And I remind myself to try and lead with kindness.

James Taylor (27:38)
Beautiful. And is there an online resource? We’ve been talking a lot about tools and technology today, but is there an online resource or a tool, like Gmail or Evernote, that you find very useful in your work?

John Craske (27:50)
I like finding new tools and things, but I think I’m going to give you a bit of a different answer. I love Spotify. It’s always got something to listen to, whether that’s new music, trying to take you away or focus on something or podcasts or audiobooks. I consume new music all of the time, almost all genres, so I love Spotify.

James Taylor (28:08)
Great talk, great talk. And if you could only recommend one book to our listeners, what would that book be?

John Craske (28:14)
We’ve been talking about AI today, so I think everybody should listen to or read The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleiman.

James Taylor (28:23)
Great, wonderful book. And as we finish up here, Sher, what is the best way if people want to connect with you? Maybe we’ve got a lot of lawyers that listen to the show. We’ve got a lot of people within legal profession, a lot of people within innovation labs as well. If we want to connect with you, learn more about the work you do, learn about your firm, what’s the best way for them to go and do that?

John Craske (28:41)
Probably just message me on LinkedIn, that’s the best way to get in touch.

James Taylor (28:45)
We’ll put all these links on the show notes. People go to the SuperCreativity Podcast, go to jamestaylor.me, just look for the SuperCreativity Podcast. We’ll have all the links for this particular episode and all the other things we’ll be talking about on the show today. John Craske, thank you so much for being a guest on the SuperCreativity Podcast.