So hi, everyone. Welcome to the Top Floor CO podcast. I'm delighted to welcome Alex Hamilton, that the founder of radiant law, law firm. Some people think of really long contracts, complicated takes long time to do means that the deals will take a long time. And it means that you're actually going to lose out. You also think of maybe burnout people because they've got to do these contracts are burnt out. Alex has a way of doing law that basically is the opposite of all of those things. And today he's going to talk about his journey, how he started in law, what was experiencing, what he thought was wrong, how he changed it, and how he did today. He's also got a really good book that summarizes all of it. So over to you, Alex, talk about how you spoke. Let's maybe start with how you started your journey in law to lead you up to the point you've got now. So I had a very traditional career initially. And I think I fell into law as a lack of imagination. So I quantified as kind of one of the big law firms in London ended up working in the US for works in New York for a year. And I was doing kind of big technology and outsourcing deals. So you kind of hire me if you wanted a new network or you know, doing a deal, I did 17 deals opposite IBM, I think. And basically, yes, a big deals long term relationships in them. And I was kind of increasingly getting this nagging feeling that this wasn't quite right. And the a very expensive, but I wasn't sure that the way lawyers kind of approach doing deals was adding as much value as we'd like to think. I thought the industry's very self centered frankly, and supplier centered rather than customer centered. And it seemed to me the incentives were all completely broken, right? Like charging by the hour doesn't exactly encourage efficiency. Partnership model means the lawyers don't tend to kind of kind of have one way of working. They're all just constantly making it up as they go along with everyone's is finding a very high focused autonomy and law firm. So none of this felt that it was helpful for customers. And I was concerned that not only we not adding enough value and doing the deals probably wrong, but also burning out like you mentioned the lawyers. So yeah, so that was kind of the starting point of doubt, I guess, that was setting in in 2009. I ended up doing this kind of Jerry Maguire. I don't know how old your audience is, but kind of Jerry Maguire mission statement, not a memo 17 pages the exact mean, he's a very junior partner, arguing that we should look at fixed pricing, we should look at how we can add more value, we should look at technology and process and proven as part of what we do. And the kind of the exact committee of leads from Watkins, which is now the second largest law firm in the world, very polite, but didn't fire me for this, but it became pretty clear that this wasn't what they were going to do. And they made a lot of money by ignoring me, right? The firm's twice as large partners, I think, are making about twice as much since then. So unfortunately, I believe my own bullshit and set up radiant law in 2011, 13 years ago, to try to do things differently. So radiant is fixed price only, no time sheets, not a partnership. We work for big companies doing their day to day contracts. So we look for kind of scale and lots of contracts. And we like that because it's a chance for us to learn how to keep improving the contracting process. And I'm pretty sure we're the fastest on the planet. We turn a contract typically in half a day. So if you want a contract drafted or a mark up, you know, dealt with or whatever. We'll cover that you'll get it back. And we have teams in Trinidad's North America, South Africa doing a mere and then just opened in Malaysia to cover a pack. So we're kind of global 24 by five contracting. So that's kind of what we did. Okay. So can you just tell us then, how do you get these very large contracts at another form of produce? And to get your equivalent shorter one in less time. But it still covers the points it needs to cover and protects the client from legal exposure. Yeah. So, so I think contracts should be short, clear, reasonable, and relevant, right? Because the starting point is contracts don't matter relationships matter, right? Or at least contracts don't add value. It's a relationship that adds value. And if you think about it that way, you know, about both sides, meeting meeting the other sides needs, and you know, which is what value creation is about. Then A, you want the contracting process to be as positive as possible and focus on how to really make it work. And B, you want the contract process to be short, because there's no value being created until Malaysia gets going something signed, right? So the contract is just there as an enabling mechanism to create enough trust to allow people to get going. So because of the incentives problem, because and the sentence include law firms charging by the app, but also understandably lawyers worried that they'll be pointed out later and told, you know, why didn't you say anything goes wrong? Why didn't you cover this? Why didn't you do it? Right? So they have no incentive to make things just fast deals. They have incentive to make everything is one sided and risk free as possible. So because of that, you end up with longer and longer, longer terms and longer and longer, more painful negotiations and deeply unreasonable drafts being set out that we get deeply unreasonable responses and then all of the pain that everyone knows, which is expensive, slow and undermines the very relationship it's meant to be creating through the negotiating process, right? So how do you turn that on its head? Well, I think the starting points is that I think contract should from the get go when they're sent out be reasonable. What I mean by reasonable, I mean, if you're on the other side, you would pick it up and go, that's fine. I'll sign it. Right. It doesn't mean giving the far away. It just means it reflects both sides positions, right? I think contract should be short, right? You know, we often take 60 page terms down to six pages. And how do you do that? Well, a lot of that stuff's just a created nonsense, right? What fundamentally matters in the contract is, do you know what you're buying or selling and do you know what you're paying? And is it workable, right? That's why contracts go wrong. And yet we spend all the time with putting boilerplate over boilerplate and all his liability provisions sucking the oxygen out of the room from not negotiating what really matters, which is how do we make this work? And is it actually going to help me? Is it going to mean my needs and your needs? So how do we do that? We're pretty ruthless. We kind of take a, I would say not a scalpel or a chainsaw to client terms. And and what's interesting is they actually, I argue, it would become safer as a result, because actually, there's incredibly large complicated contracts. No one understands quite all the edge cases and so on. If you have to boil a page of guff down to one sentence, you actually is more generally applicable, more principle led, and easier for everyone to understand more likely to be followed. So, so we do that with clients to help them do it. And I think whatever size organization you have, if you can, in your in your standard contracts, the extent that you can use them can send out really short clear relevant and reasonable contracts that basically the other side should just sign because it's a boringly bind, right, then you will speed up your sales. And that's pretty helpful. So yeah, that's how we do it. Sure. So have you got some examples that you're able to share? So you talked about the 60 to six. So what kind of things are in the 60 that other firms do that you think are irrelevant? Is it they just go into more detail? Or is there certain things they're covering that you think is completely not? Yeah. So, so, so there's this fascinating study that keeps being repeated by an organization called world CC world commerce and contracting. So they're a global organization of contract managers and people both sides are buying and selling. So every two years, they ask their members, what are the things that everyone spends all their time negotiating what goes wrong? Right. So what goes wrong is people aren't clear on what they're buying, what they're selling and so on, what gets negotiated is liability, termination, indemnities, all of this nonsense. Right. So in other words, most of the 60 pages is focused on what happens when the contract goes wrong, rather than how do we make it work? Right. And that means that everyone spending all that time negotiating all that stuff. Most of the stuff in there for that is not required. Right. It is just people repeating themselves time and time again, another way of whacking the other side of something possibly goes wrong, whoever's whatever reason, you know, whatever. So when we shorten the contract, it covers the same topics, but it's just basically just says, let's let something other capital liabilities X, not we're going to have this, you know, generally, it's kind of light on indemnities, heavy on putting front and foremost what the services what you're buying what you're selling and so on. And the pricing model, we tend to make contracts much more modular. So rather than trying to cover every eventuality, we tend to have like, you know, these are the standard terms, three, six pages, but generally true. And then just a page or two for this kind of thing or that kind of topic, you know, if it's consulting versus SaaS contract or whatever. So between modularity and just ruthlessly shortening things, you can cover the same ground, but it's just that focus we put on, what are we buying, what are we saying? Does it work? Will it help? Right. How do we make sure that this project doesn't go off track? How do we make sure that this service works rather than just blank? Let's put so many weapons in our contract that they'll definitely perform this time, which by the way, there is a long track record of people trying to really weaponize contracts and make sure the supplies, for example, absolutely doomed if they if it doesn't work. And it's still not working. And the classic example of this was the NHS IT projects where there were an incredibly robust contracts put in place with the supplies and it still failed because basically they will just sign anything to get the thing the salesmen bugger off, right? Got his bonus on a bonus. And then the people who are delivering left pick up the pieces and despite having, you know, the fear of death, God put into them with this kind of terms they still couldn't deliver because it hadn't been thought through. Interesting. Okay. So you've had a successful law for him, for is it 13 years now? Yeah, he says successful, everything looks easy on the outside. And so it feels like, you know, it's wonderful journey, but it feels like it's tough, but you know, there's always tough. Most people that started when you started if not there anymore. I mean, you're probably in the top 2% lasting that long. So so what advice would you give to someone that is looking to start a law firm to try and, you know, you know, make them maybe share, you know, the things that lie ahead that maybe you didn't see on day one that you overcome, just maybe talk a bit more about the journey to anyone that's, you know, sitting in the, in a law firm, work of someone thinking, you know what, like you did, I don't like how she's going on to try and do it myself. Do you want to maybe give guidance to someone in that position? So we're really weird. And I, I struggle to say, do it like us because we're really weird. And I don't know if it makes sense to most people, right? So, so it's kind of a people out there. Okay, but lawyers weird, you know, well, no, maybe it's like that you'd say is an outsider, but law firms are different, I think, and law firms are different because lawyers are different. And it's at lawyers as a cohort have to to standard deviations more likely to be high autonomy, unsociable, interestingly, even rainmakers that can't be particularly successful at sales, they tend to be highly risk adverse. And they tend to be very good at verbal reasoning and reasoning things. But they're generally cats. Okay, so the fundamental question of setting up a law firm is do you fight the tendency of lawyers to be cats, or do you optimize for the cat like nature of law of lawyers? So, so the typical model for a law firm is a partnership, right, where all the partners can kind of lies, they kind of kind of play nice and fit in into some level and perform some level can do what they want, right? And then under the law firms, they're a bunch of terrified junior lawyers, a lot of partners, they're a bunch of terrified junior lawyers. So law firms are traditionally the partnership model built for high autonomy of the partners, right? And so it, the whole thing is a power dynamic of you bring in, you know, people and they basically have power if they have a book of business, they're rainmakers, right, that's where power comes from. And there's a whole dynamic. So you're just setting up a law firm. The first question is, are you going to set up as a partnership, right, which is what people normally do because it's easier to do it. And, and so on, like I said, we're weird. Or do you set up on the basis of, we're going to try to change how this is delivered. We're going to try to add more value. We're not just going to keep lawyering, you know, are we going to have time sheets or are we actually going to take process seriously and so on. And pretty much everyone comes to the collision crisis too hard and I like my autonomy anyway. So I'll go to the partnership model. So that's what I said, we're weird. You've been, I've been fighting since the very beginning, my own tendency and everyone's tendency to just disappear and become a total cat hurting exercise. And instead say, no, no, we're going to have one way of working at the firm. Everyone's going to be followed, but everyone's going to be part of improving, right? We're going to actually take process and tech and so on seriously, rather than just doing lawyering. And I think that is the hardest and most important decision you'll make because whichever path where you go, there's a huge path dependency going on, right, you can't take a partnership model and turn it into a radiant law. It's just not possible, because the power structure will prevent you from doing it in the future. So that kind of key seed decision is the one that I would focus. Okay, interesting. So on your journey, from starting the firm to now, what were kind of challenges you had, and how did you overcome them? Well, I think the first challenge was we hadn't bloody clue what we were doing. I mean, I mean, the level of naivety when we set this up, just a group of five of us, we hadn't a clue. And I think the most important thing I did early on was I reached out, I finally met someone, he looked to me and said the only, he's nourished, the only second thing you've done right is set up as a company, right? We're going to that partnership once. Only think second thing you've done right. So that was tough, probably true. So he was incredibly helpful in helping us kind of rethink how we were preaching it. And then I brought into the non exact chair, who Greg Toughnell used to run mother care and son, brother of Phil Toughnell. And he was very sweet and gentle with us. But I think he was slightly shocked at how we little we knew about their teaching this stuff and business law school rather. And they certainly didn't learn as a partner at law firm. Like how a little we knew about how to make this stuff work. So, and happy as a balance sheets and all of the usual hygiene and business. But I think that's common with the start businesses. So we brought him as non exact chair and he's been fabulous. So surrounding yourself with people who really know what they're doing, and can help you think it through, I think is essential, you can't figure it out for all for yourself. So the journey was kind of we got going as a group. I think we at that ended up pretty quickly acting like partners, even though we're a company now and it's different and all the rest of it really just fell back under pressure to what we knew. We kind of ended up growing quite big. There was a falling out at one point where some people left and so on. And it turns out, you know, I thought it was an existential moment, but it turns out companies regularly have that event, right? I think that's pretty sure, Jenny, you've seen this before, right? This kind of happens, some point in story. But yeah, it's not encouraging people to have that moment, but it's pretty tough. But that's happened. Right. And Daniel Priestley is quite good at this stuff from then, you know, describes it as how you can go to about 12 people and have a lifestyle business. And that's great. But then, you know, what you want is a high performance business, more like 50 plus people with lots of tech and IP and knowing how to do it. And in between those two is the way it calls the desert where, you know, kind of, you know, people lose things and sometimes companies die and all the rest of it. And I think we had a lot of problems. I think we kind of crossed it now, but we had a lot of problems in crossing the desert in terms of, you've got to bring in people, you know what they're doing, but they piss off the original founders. You've got to invest a huge amount in tech and process and all of this kind of IP creation and so on, which means your profits go down, right? Growth eats cash and working capital. So we went through all of that. And you know, we got halfway through got knocked back when it was like fall out. And then kind of got through now. So that was kind of the journey. And it's definitely gotten more fun. I think there were periods goes in the desert, which are really, really hard. But now we kind of vaguely know what we're doing. We look around every day and go, my God, it's such to improve. It is much more fun running that kind of organization. So keep going. Or decide not to go above 12 people, right? They just say lifestyle business is great. I want to be able to take time off and do whatever. So, you know, I guess knowingly choosing there is a good idea to. OK, so so what advice you got to people in terms of recruitment about how to spot talent? I don't know. This is so hard. We have a super structured process for interviewing and, you know, I think we did so high with your head or something. It's a good book on this with kind of methodology. But I still think it's pretty hit in the mess. We did a psychometric testing and I don't know what it helps. I think we basically interview for we hire people who interview well, which is, you know, all everything's about how to avoid that. But I think you still do it. We've got an amazing team. And I love the team. So we're definitely not, it's not a total disaster, right? We are hiring people. But we regularly, I think, get people who ultimately not that happy in this fairly unusual environment. So, you know, it's a minority, but it still happens. So, I don't know. I think one thing that certainly occurred to me recently is that there's a big temptation to always go and hire the next big gun and, you know, expensive people who have sold everything. And I think that overloads what I think it's a high risk moves. I think you can get wonderful people. But often getting one person will actually be able to deliver in your actual environment and actually work is quite a high risk strategy. So I do think that the more you can kind of solve problems by having kind of simple repeatable processes and just taming a lot of the firm and making it run and not expecting it to be, you know, work on pure heroics and instead just on building a repeatable system, the more you can decompress those hiring decisions. That makes sense. How did you know how to build that repeatable system? Oh, God, it's still a work in process. I mean, I mean, we always been interested in lean and I bought a professor of lean as I've career in 2018 and that he helped over now, like we turned contracts in half a day and that came from, you know, applying a lot of the lean principles. We're applying the Shingo model, which is this insanely high standard of operational excellence, kind of codified lean Americans codified Japanese toy system. And I brought in people to help with that. So there was kind of a lot of kind of people going, Oh, my God, you got to have repeatable, but I certainly do these things that make it work like this. So, so that's, I mean, it's 13 years and I still feel we've barely scratched the surface so a long way to go. But I, you know, there's a good book emyth, which I think is helpful, but I read it and said, yeah, I got the point early on. And the point is, you know, just everything you do in your organization, you figure out how to do it and the reason when you hand it off. I don't think I taken it nearly as seriously. I realized now as I should have done in terms of what that actually means that discipline, but I guess everyone goes to that journey. Sure, sure. So in terms of so once you've got the people in us, and how do you manage them to get the best out of them? gain work in progress. So we are very, I like to quote, it's flatish and we try to push decision making down to the team. So the team members are very junior often, and like, you know, maybe kind of five years into their career often, who maybe even charge of quite important things. And a lot of them just seize that and step up and run with it. But the hardest thing I think we find is to encourage people to feel a sense of real agency that they can actually make things better and improve things. So we're constantly kind of constantly banging on a ballot. You can actually fix things and just go and do it and make these things better and talk about the people who do it. And often I find team can get stuck and just just keep going in their day to day work rather than improving things as part of their day to day work. So it's hard. But but I do find that if we give people high levels of responsibility, they do step up. So I mean, overall, it seems to be working as this I said, very weird, very flat kind of organization. And in terms of the future, how do you see the future going for radiant law and also the legal profession in general? Well, really, you know, I want to grow. But most importantly, I want to grow on the dimension of us keeping getting better at what we do and how we work as an organization. So I would love to one day challenge for the Shingo Prize known as the Nobel Prize of Manufacturing, which no one in professional services yet won. So that's kind of a personal ambition. I think, you know, it's such a lean and how we improve organizations such fast in any area. So for me, that's the great adventure ahead for for radiant. The legal industry, I used to have strongly held opinions about how everything was going to be changed. And I was utterly wrong, right? I mean, people have been talking about changing the legal industry forever. And now a lot of talk about how I can replace all the lawyers. Good luck with that. I think it will be business as usual. I'm afraid. So I don't think there's very much change at all. They'll just be increasing talk of change kind of performative stuff, not real stuff. The app is give some more detail on that. Obviously, people that are getting their own contracts now through chat GPT. And obviously, there's flaws in it. Can you just give some examples of where that is completely flawed? With chat GPT. I mean, if you kind of want to lie, it's better than nothing. But but it is very unreliable. And it looks good. It's it looks like it's a great product. But it's kind of outpost. It's frankly terrifying. I've spent a lot of time wrote a paper on fine. I mean, I mean, LinkedIn or a point of paper in November, I've wrote about it. It's also covered in the book sign here. My recommendation if you if you need a template and so on is find a previous deal that looked okay and start from that because it probably coherent and just keep improving that template and making it simpler and shorter and you know, talk to someone if you've got questions, but then go and ask someone to write sign for you because I end up being huge to say I don't understand these five points. Can I change these you okay? I think that's a much safer way of doing it with the key for your contracts. You know, especially kind of selling and so on is putting what you're going to do upfront and make putting the focus on what the deal is. This is, you know, this is what we're selling. This is the thing. This is how it's going to work. This is what we need you to do. This is this is how we'll charge you and when you charge you. And if you focus the contract on that and making sure that that really meets the customer's needs, the stuff at the back doesn't really matter. Right. It doesn't try any matter. Right. So don't get hung up about that. Just focus on are we seeing eye to eye going into this contract that both of us kind of know what's going to happen and what success looks like. And we believe it's got a real chance of working. And if you can keep going there, which is utterly dependent on your business lawyers can't write that for you. It's like, that's like you should be doing, I think your contracts will be much, much better and safer, right? Rather than throw into GPT where it is wild the outcomes in terms of, I mean, just I can't figure out what the hell it's trying to do. It looks kind of vaguely good. You might look impressive, but the content is actually nonsense. Interesting. So you mentioned a lot in, I think in the book and the articles about the importance of client relationships. So what's your advice to people in terms of, you know, maintaining and improving client relationships? I think you can't, you can't obsess enough about what the client needs, right? So everything starts with what do they actually need? What would actually help them? And the only way you find out is rather than guessing is talking to them on a regular basis and getting feedback cycles and then actually doing something about the feedback. So I think, you know, it just needs to be obsessive about talking to clients and making sure that things are working and figuring out and being open to the idea that your services or product, whatever isn't perfect, and constantly looking for how it could be improved. So I think that's everything, right? The more you focus on the other person, how you create value for them, the better, funnily enough, everything ends up working out for you, at least that's my experience. So, so yeah, that's my recommendation. And when you sign a client relationships, some people say obviously, you know, do what you can and talk, but in terms of, you know, the hospitality side in terms of taking them out, you know, taking sort of events, etc. How important is doing that on top of just having a good relationship and contacting them a lot? You know, you used to do that as a big law lawyer, right? That was pretty common. I had a box at Arsenal and box at the O2 and all of that. And that was kind of common and normal. These days, because a lot of the world's virtual radian, we've never really gone down that route. I like to see people when I can have calls with them. But I don't think, I think that's quite, I think people like it. But to be honest, it's hard sometimes to figure out when that's not bribery. Right. And I know, you know, kind of people like who uncomfortable bits like, what exactly are you getting out of this other than your notes? I think the most important thing is actually meeting their work, their day to day needs, right? And that is having conversations and talking. Okay, interesting. Have you got any examples of, and you don't need to obviously name it, just just something just helpful to listeners about where, you know, potentially, if relationships not going right, how to spot it's not going right, even if someone's not being really clear about it, how to a spot it and then be to intervene and then put it on a corrective path before in a client is either disappears and it's just not getting their needs met. Yeah. Yeah, we have, we've kind of figured out heuristics that are good warnings. Like, we know that if we don't respond to something less than half a day, people ask for help and not, you know, when we're helping them with their contracts, that's a good indicator there'll be problems down the line. We know that if the contracts aren't coming in on a regular basis, but only spikes, then we know we're being basically put into a quadrant of, you know, this is just overflow and not really helping. So I, and we do customer satisfaction scores with our business and, you know, starts, I see every result. And if we're not starting to get trends there, then you get worried. So, and if we're not responding to them and picking up the phone and saying, listen, this wasn't great for you. How can we make it better? That's also a warning. So I think you can kind of put quite data led heuristics in, especially in our world, which is lots of repeatable stuff, where you can spot that that's going wrong. And my experience is if something goes wrong and you really jump on it, then and help fix it and doing a very positive non-winy, not non just of self justifying way, you'll often end up with a stronger relationship at the other end. And if you haven't gone wrong, which is my first observe that. But you know, that's kind of how we approach it. Okay, really good, really good. So what's your advice to people that looking for a lawyer to make sure they find the right one. And you know, when they approach potential people, the kind of questions they should be asking to make sure they get the right fit. Yeah, this is very, very context specific, right? I mean, if you've got a big M&A deal or litigation or something, then you may want to go to a law firm. But for smaller companies trying to just get pragmatic advice, I would actually be looking for that you'll find out there, kind of people who like fractional GCs or general counsel or kind of lawyers who often one man, one woman bands that have got a lot of experience, but now work with lots of small companies. And I think finding people like that is incredibly valuable, because you get just judgment calls, you get people who are going to be quick and who go, no, the points this, this is worry about this. The more you get sucked into kind of bigger law firms, middle to middle law firms, the more incredibly expensive it gets and the pressure on the lawyers to like charge as many hours as possible. And blah, blah, blah, is going to make it I think often feel like a very poor experience. And then you've got a question of at what point in your growth journey to eventually hire a lawyer? And I think what I would do is have a long term relationship with someone you trust who can help you with your contracts on tricky points and is actually making you sustainable and so on, help you with like data protection, employment issues, yada, yada, and just give you another person if they don't do it. And then, you know, take your time about hiring your own in house lawyer. But then, you know, at some point it becomes cost effective to bring them in house. The basic equation is that an in house lawyer is about the third, the cost of an external lawyer. So if you've got the work of a lawyer happening every year, you may be better off bringing it in this kind of the point when you OK, Alex, there's anything we've not covered today that you think would be helpful for business owners that are listening to this podcast. I think just that nagging feeling you have of this contracting process is seem ridiculous and painful. And I'm not entirely sure but I must I'm a bit afraid because you know, I don't want to go to jail or whatever. Just just just don't lose that feeling and trust yourself. You're right. These contracting has been made way too complicated, way too hard. And if we could just focus on creating a great relationship and being really clear about what each side's doing, the legal stuff is a lot less important. And so trust yourself on that gut instinct. Excellent. Well, thank you, Alex. It's been really refreshing to hear a very different approach to law contracts. And love you honestly, showing about the journey and, you know, the hiring and the managing of people and also giving people that lower levels more of a chance to shine. It's really refreshing. So thanks very much for joining Alex. I'm sure there's lots of really good things for the listeners to take upon and take action on. And if people want to contact you because they're interested in contracts that aren't 60 pages long or anything else, how how would they do that? It's Alex Hamilton on LinkedIn, and the book's called Sign Here, and that's on Amazon. But I'd like to send you a copy if you get in touch. Yeah, happy to talk. Thank you, Alex. It's been a pleasure. Brilliant, Jerry. Thank you.
