Volume 5: Creative

Tell us about yourself and your biggest focus right now 

I’m Greg Lambert, Chief Innovation Officer at Jackson Walker. My role is to set the firm’s strategy and direction for AI and automation. The biggest part of that is staying ahead of rapid changes.

It’s easy for a firm to invest in AI and then go back to business as usual. My role is to listen to our practice groups to determine which parts of our business take too long, cost too much, or where clients are demanding more.

It’s a back-and-forth. Exposing them to resources, hearing their ideas, and deciding whether they can be scaled across the entire firm. 

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

Creativity. The willingness to look at new ways of doing old tasks. In the age of AI, you have to step outside your comfort zone and pursue solutions that may seem impractical on paper.

We’re lucky to have a lot of very creative attorneys. That creativity is nurtured by allowing them to experiment and bring their originality into the practice. That can be a double-edged sword. It’s a lot easier to manage if everyone is doing things the same way. But we define the outcomes our clients need and let our lawyers find their own way there.

How do you encourage your team to think more boldly? 

I’ve benefited from something that legal is not traditionally known for. For some reason, the industry really latched onto AI early, seeing the value ahead of everyone else.  

I think there are three types of people. The ones who jump on the boat immediately, the ones who linger at the dock before boarding last, and the ones who just wave as the boat sails into the sunset. Luckily, we’re seeing fewer of the third group.

Many of our attorneys, who are typically risk-averse, immediately recognized the value of this new tool. But that also opens the door for me to point to other tech and say, ‘This tool that we bought you five years ago actually solves the issue you’re having.’ I can take advantage of this new openness to change and the benefits that come with it. 

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

In the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986, the engineers knew that the rubber O-ring gaskets didn’t perform well in cold weather. But they became overconfident because nothing had gone wrong, treating the absence of evidence as proof of evidence to the contrary.

I worry about that with law firms. That we will become so reliant on AI that we trust it to catch all our errors and stop checking whether it made any. Simon Willison calls it the ‘lethal trifecta.’

• You give AI complete access to your internal information.
• You give AI access to external, untrusted communication.
• You give AI the ability to read, write, and send information outside of your firm without human input.

Each of those, on its own, is okay. Two of those together, you can create walls to protect yourself. But if you do all three, it’s a disaster waiting to happen.

It’s something I worry about a lot. We need to retain that cautious nature and continue building our skill of questioning outputs. Don’t ever get comfortable enough to think the process is infallible. 

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

A lot of the work we do is not that nuanced. Quite frankly, no one wants to do it. Our clients don’t want us doing it, we don’t want to do it, and much of it just gets written down anyway.

So, we ask, ‘What would this work look like if we had AI tools do the first run?’ It’s not the answer to every task, but we are trying to get everyone to look at the process in different ways. It’s made our people feel comfortable having that conversation with our clients.

There’s this worry that clients will turn around and demand to see where we are saving money. But it often helps them see they can offload less nuanced work they normally couldn’t afford to take off the GC’s desk. 

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

People don’t like change because they don’t like uncertainty. We can never remove all the uncertainty, but you have to show the vision and where we’re going.

I like talking about what engineers call the ‘J-curve effect.’ It’s very likely that when you implement a change, your efficiency will initially drop. It’s going to be harder at first. If you can push through—and explain that the dip is expected—you come out the other side on that upward slope.

Clearly communicating your outcomes helps drive change better than anything.