Joyce Gioia on identifying trends, scanning processes, stakeholder experience, and adopting personas for communicating (Ep22)

“It’s about not getting so constrained by the channel of information and see it as a sole purpose, but being able to see the connection points to other things that are relevant to you.”

– Stephen Poor

Stephen is Chair Emeritus of leading employment law firm Seyfarth & Shaw, which has 900 lawyers across 17 offices and multiple continents. He led the firm as Chairman for 15 years, introducing a range of industry-leading innovations, and he now focuses on the firm’s client-facing technology strategy which includes robotics, AI, and cognitive computing.

Website: Stephen Poor

LinkedIn: Stephen Poor

Twitter: Stephen Poor

What you will learn

• What is a good practice when reading books (01:48)
• How to keep on top of changing legislative information (05:09)
• How law firms keep up with information overload (08:56)
• Why focus not on information but on connection points (15:06)
• How to define your need and look for outside solutions (17:25)
• Why structured thinking is needed to filter information (19:26)
• How to apply your frameworks to new and different scenarios (21:31)
• How to occasionally go broad to find context and relevance (26:38)

Episode resources

• Lexis
• Westlaw
• Seyfarth Shaw LLP
• Ed Walters
• Bob Ambrogi

Transcript

Ross Dawson: Stephen, it’s wonderful to have you on the show.

Stephen Poor: Ross, thank you for having me. I appreciate the opportunity.

Ross: You are a lawyer, you also run...

Stephen: Do you have to say that with such hesitation, Ross?

Ross: There is so much more than that. That’s why I’m saying, your starting point is you’re a lawyer, you run a major law firm, and you also delve deep into the emerging technologies that are changing the legal industry. There’s plenty to keep on top of there. I’d like to just actually go back to the beginning when you were a law student, when you were studying law. Did you have any practices that enabled you to take in the amount of information that it requires to pass your legal degrees?

Stephen: I’ll give you some context first. I’m old enough now that when I was in law school, it was pre-internet, computer-assisted research was only just starting. We had these fancy things called Lexis and Westlaw terminals, but nobody knew how to use them. The information you needed was in these things we used to have called books. I know you’re writing one. As you are looking at information for learning to be a law student, you’re getting it from your colleagues, your other law students, the professors, and the books. What’s interesting about the books, it’s something I picked up in your book, a theme you picked up on, which was that one of the things you had to learn was what you referred to as keynotes; synthesized information where they’re trying to sort the cases into topics.
Oftentimes, you got the most useful information, not by the keynote you’re particularly on, but by ones your eyes happen to catch by going through the book, by going through the pages. I always found that to be fascinating. It’s replicated itself over the years in different formats where useful information is not always exactly what you’re looking for, sometimes peripheral or in a framework, that’s not usually capturable that easy. It was a lot of time in the library. I was on the law review so there was a lot of information, each member then reviewed, distilled and shared with other members of the review. It was that sort of thing, and I’m still not sure we capture the information we needed to become a good lawyer. In fact, I’m certain we didn’t. We became good law students, not necessarily trained to be good lawyers.

Ross: Yes. We can always point to ways our education system can improve to create people ready for the workforce.

Stephen: Yes, I’ve got a whole riff on that but that’s not the point of this discussion.

Ross: Moving on to the next step. To a point when you’re a legal student, it’s relatively static law, that is the law as it stands and you’ll be able to then grasp that, and...