Volume 7: Translator

Tell us about yourself and your biggest focus right now 

I’m Glenn LaForce, the Chief Knowledge & Innovation Officer at Holland & Knight. We like to say the guiding principle for my team’s remit at the firm is based on four things: increasing profitable revenue, decreasing costs, mitigating risk, and enhancing the user experience.

A primary focus right now is to make Holland & Knight a truly AI-enabled law firm, but that doesn’t mean just deploying new tools. It means creating an environment where our lawyers can combine their expertise with the firm’s institutional knowledge and use emerging technologies to deliver better outcomes for the client.

That’s a large remit, and everything is so intertwined throughout the entire business model. Are we working faster? What does that do to billable hours? How do we then deliver more value-based pricing? How does this affect the compensation model? I find that puzzle super fascinating.

What is the one behavior or mindset you believe most determines long-term success in a law firm? 

You know the dart scene from Ted Lasso? The one where he says, ‘Be curious, not judgmental.’ I think curiosity is the most important behavior.

The firms that will thrive over the next ten years are those filled with people who ask, ‘How can this be done better?’ To me, curiosity drives learning; it drives innovation; it drives collaboration; but perhaps most importantly, it prevents complacency.

Technology will change. The market will change. Client expectations will change. But if you build a culture around continuous learning and curiosity, you can adapt to those changes.

Curiosity is not necessarily native to a law firm. It’s something you have to generate through constant change management.

How do you encourage your team to think more boldly? 

What I’ve learned is that creating meaningful change takes persistence. People rarely embrace a new idea because of a presentation or business case alone. They embrace it when they experience the benefits firsthand.

When you’re introducing something like this, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Your data will never be perfect. Your fields will never be fully aligned. But don’t let that stop you.

So many times, I see people with data programs getting stuck on start. Just start somewhere. That will begin driving value for your lawyers and create this adoption loop that benefits all parties.

What is the biggest shift law firms need to make in the next three years? 

Moving from an expertise-based model to an expertise-plus-intelligence model.

Traditionally, a lawyer’s value comes from expertise. But now they have access to AI, advanced searching, and vast collections of institutional knowledge. The firms that will win are the ones who successfully combine human judgment with machine capability. The ones that stop treating data as exhaust and start treating it more like infrastructure.

That’s one of the initiatives we’re building in our firm. Making knowledge easier to find, reducing friction in daily work, and helping our people adopt AI to enhance their professional judgment, rather than replace it.

How are you using data and AI to reshape how your people work? 

The most exciting opportunity here is reducing the overall friction of how a lawyer works. We’re focused on helping our lawyers spend less time searching for information, recreating work product, and navigating complex processes. We want them to have more time applying judgment and building relationships.

I think AI is most powerful when it’s embedded in your daily workflows. The nature of your work changes when you can seamlessly access knowledge, expertise, and insights at the right moment. At that point, the lawyer becomes more strategic, more collaborative, and more valuable to the client.

What's one piece of advice for the next generation of legal leaders? 

Don’t start by selling technology. Start by solving the problem.

I see too many people go in and pitch technology to their partners instead of solving the problem at hand. The most successful change leaders focus less on the tool and more on the outcome.

Change is fundamentally about people. The hardest part of a transformation is rarely the technology. It’s helping people imagine a better future and giving them the confidence to move forward into it.

To do that, you have to get close to the actual work. So many leaders never get close to the problem. They operate at altitude. They’re never sitting with the associate who’s stuck in the office at 11 o’clock at night, or the paralegal who is doing the same task for the 100th time in a row.

Adoption is a human puzzle. Understand the day-to-day problems well enough that when you craft a solution, it lands as a gift rather than an assignment.