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Mark Samuels on the Impact of AI on Legal Practice, the Evolution of the Legal Market in Orange County and His Pathbreaking IP Practice

Dean Austen Parrish interviews Mark Samuels, Firm Vice-Chair and Partner of O’Melveny & Myers LLP, about his founding of O’Melveny’s Intellectual Property & Technology practice group, his predictions for the future (preview: will AI or the law firm billable hour be more prevalent at law firms at the end of this decade?), the imperative for lawyers to give back to their communities and his wise advice for law students.

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Featuring:

• 

  Austen Parrish

  Dean and Chancellor’s Professor of Law
  University of California, Irvine School of Law

• 

  Mark Samuels

  Firm Vice-Chair and Partner
  O’Melveny & Myers LLP

Podcast Transcript

Intro 0:05
Welcome to UCI Law Talks from the University of California, Irvine School of Law for all our latest news, follow UCI Law on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Austen Parrish 0:16
Hey, thank you for joining us. My name is Austen Parrish. I'm the Dean and a Chancellor's professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. This is UCI Law talks, the podcast where you learn more about the amazing anteater community that is UC Irvine and get to hear from leaders and lawyers of Southern California. Today, Mark Samuels is joining us to talk about law and law firms in Southern California, the impacts of technology and legal practice. His own career and advice for new lawyers. Mark is the vice chair of O’Melveny & Myers. He founded O’Melveny & Myers intellectual property and technology practice group more than two decades ago, and he served as a chair of that practice group for many years. He's been recognized as the best lawyer in America for intellectual property litigation named a California litigation star and intellectual property by benchmark litigation California is consistently listed as a leading intellectual property practitioner by chambers USA. He's also very engaged in the community. For over 15 years, he served on the board of directors for Public Counsel in Los Angeles, on the board of the Doheny Eye Institute, and has been deeply involved with the UCLA law Alumni Association, serving on its board several times. Mark's daughter Chelsea is a proud 2015 graduate of UC Irvine who served on the Law Review, was involved with our pro bono programs, graduated with pro bono high honors, and is currently practicing at Proskauer Rose in Los Angeles. Mark has served as O’Melveny & Myers vice chair for over 13 years. O’Melveny & Myers is the oldest large law firm in Los Angeles, and has opened its Newport Beach office in 1979 the firm is known for having helped bring both hydroelectric power and the Dodgers to Los Angeles, both alumni, including the late former LA Mayor Richard Reardon, Secretary of State Warren Christopher and William T Coleman Jr, the lead strategist for the plaintiffs in Brown vs. Board of Education. The firms almost 800 attorneys are in offices in eight countries on three continents. Hey, Mark, thanks for joining us on the podcast. My pleasure, Dean. Love to talk about law firms and how legal practice at law firms are changing. But before we do that, can we talk a little bit about your practice? How did you get started, and how did you know in law school that you'd focus on intellectual property?

Mark Samuels 2:23
When I graduated in the early 1980s instantly, I spent my whole career at O’Melveny & Myers. But in those days, the firm started everyone in a rotation program. We had 5, 10, week rotations. I did a real estate rotation and a banking rotation, and ultimately I did a litigation rotation and click for me. In those days, O’Melveny & Myers did not have any litigation sub specialization at all. The philosophy then was that litigation is like carpentry. Need to learn how to use the tools. You learn the trade and when you know how to use the tools, you can use them to build a house or a church or an apartment building or or what have you. And that was, that was the philosophy then, and to some degree, that's still the philosophy now. I got into IP rather accidentally. There were two brothers that formed a company, actually Orange County company. They were Holocaust survivors, and the only lawyer they knew happened to be a partner at O’Melveny & Myers, and they had a patent problem. And they came to the partner I was working for and asked if he could handle it, and he said, we don't do patent law here, and the client said, You're smart guy, you can figure it out, and you need help. We'll get you somebody to stand by your side. Partner assembled a group of young associates. I happen to be one of them, and we didn't know what we didn't know. We learned the statute and stumbled around for a while, but we had some early success, we found we really liked it. Next thing you know, we've got more and more work. We were lucky in our timing. The US economy, then was just moving from industrial to innovation type of economy, and Silicon Valley was in its early days, and we just happen to be in the right place at the right time.

Austen Parrish 2:58
It's amazing how much that practice area has grown over the years now, and what a core part it is of law school curriculum now to teach intellectual property law.

Mark Samuels 4:32
Oh, it's unbelievable. In my law school class of almost 500 students, there was one engineer, one undergraduate engineer, and all he wanted to do was to get a job at the FBI drug lab as a lawyer. And now today, engineers are quite common in law school.

Austen Parrish 4:51
Yeah, very much. We have a partnership with the engineering school, and it's, it's stunning, actually, how many people from stem broadly, are coming to law school. You're the vice chair of O’Melveny & Myers. And you've served as that position for almost 14 years. Can you explain to our listeners, what does the Vice Chair do, and what do you do in that role?

Mark Samuels 5:07
I'm sure, different at every firm O’Melveny & Myers, it's a incredibly diverse job. I on any given day, I could be involved in anything from setting recruiting goals to handling conflict issues, exploring geographic expansion, setting firm strategy, HR matters, office leases. We have a process for approving new clients, reviewing associate bonus recommendations, and I chair our firms, partner compensation committee. So it's a really diverse day. One of the things I like about it is you never know what's going to happen on any given day. In the last week, I've been completely consumed in the headlines of the day concerning the administration's attack on law firms and dei and law firms, and that's consuming most of my time this week. Who knows about next week?

Austen Parrish 6:07
But definitely a busy time. It must give you a great sort of sense of what's happening, not only at your own firm, but more broadly. So I'd love to get your insight as to how the management of large law firms have changed over time. Started off by talking about how the practice of law has changed and the rotations, how have you seen over that same time, the management of law firms? How has that evolved?

Mark Samuels 6:30
I think the main change is the professionalization of the law firm. Back when we were a mere twin lawyer law firm, the partners thought they were smart enough to do everything themselves, and they did do everything themselves, mostly poorly. And over the years, there's been an incredible amount of specialization and professionalization. We found that good lawyers don't necessarily make good business people, and we've got highly skilled professionals these days all the large law firms do in HR, in talent development, in marketing, in client relations, in finance, in real estate and many other functions. It's a luxury in a large law firm to have really great professionals to do all of the things that they do well, and free the lawyers up to do what we do well, the biggest change I've seen, and the other changes are obvious, large law firms have gotten much, much larger. We were the largest firm in Los Angeles when I graduated law school, and we were 200 and I think I was the 210th lawyer. And it seemed like a huge seemed like a huge place, and there are law firms with 1000s of lawyers. Now, the other major change, I would say, and this may be more unique to Southern California, is that the client base in Southern California has changed quite a bit. There's less industry in Southern California than there used to be the banks. Southern California had a number of large regional banks. They all over time. They merged into larger institutions, none of which are headquartered in California anymore, so there's been consolidation in the entertainment industry, and in their place, you have a lot of innovation companies. Now. You've got a lot of financial players, private equity, a maturation of the local economy that's quite stark for those of us who've been practicing for a long time.

Austen Parrish 8:43
That makes sense. Before we talk more about Orange County, I'd love to ask you the question about culture. It seems hard maintain a firm culture when you're dealing with even 200 attorneys, but some of these big firms now have, as you say, 1000s of attorneys and then 1000s and 1000s of other staff. I know O’Melveny & Myers has always prided itself on a particular type of culture. How do you maintain that sort of culture when you're talking about 800,000 lawyers in these offices all over the world?

Mark Samuels 9:10
We do pride ourselves on that. We call ourselves a culture forward law firm. It's a very important part of how we hire. It's important part of how we promote. And I will say the culture was around has been around a lot longer than I've been and some of the things, some of our traditions, very deeply ingrained. One of the main ones is that we have a very flat structure. Our leaders are kind of servant leaders. They're coaches more than managers, and our partnership is a true partnership. Everyone has a vote and a say, and I remember as a brand new lawyer sitting in a big conference room with a big trial team. I was three months out of law school, four months out of law school, and they're discussing. In the issue of the day that happened during trial, and they turned and asked me what I thought. And I thought, Why in the world are they asking me? I don't know anything, but that is part of the tradition here, is that everyone's views matter and everybody's views count. So we've got a lot of ways of transmitting culture. We send all of our lawyers to several leadership academies, several day long events, where we try to inculcate our ways. And it seems to work people sort of self select, and I think we've done a really amazing job of maintaining that culture. So I've never worked in a law firm other than this one. I always tell recruits that I'm like the worst source of information about comparative information about law firms. But I've learned from talking to laterals here, people who have worked in other law firms, either as associates or partners or both that there is something special here, and they have become our strongest cultural torch bearers, I would say, because they've seen other places and they know the difference.

Austen Parrish 11:15
My sense is that a lot of firms look fairly similar on paper, size and practice areas. But when you dig in and you work there, there can be actually stark differences on your day to day, quality of life, quality of practice, the way people interact with one another.

Mark Samuels 11:29
I would agree with that. You know, when I ended up here, because I had a better interview day here than at some of the other firms I was interviewing at, the things that were important to me then are not important to me. Now, the things that brought me here aren't the things that kept me here. There's a lot of serendipity, because we do all look pretty much the same on paper.

Austen Parrish 11:52
Yeah, I think it's one of the challenges for students these days, is trying to dig a little deeper than just what's on paper and kind of get a sense if it's a good fit. Talked a little bit about how much things have changed and evolved. What do you see as some of the key things going forward, if you had to predict some of the big evolutions that you're expecting in the legal profession or in law firm practice, are there things that O’Melveny & Myers is focused on, or things that you think are going to be particularly big in the coming years?

Mark Samuels 12:18
I'll make three predictions, and I'm sure at least two of them will be wrong. One of them is that, within five years, artificial intelligence is going to make a lot of what the young lawyers do completely different. As an example today, what young litigation lawyers do is they spend many hours learning the facts of a case. They learn it from reading depositions, from looking at documents, from doing the legal research to writing briefs. That's what young lawyers do. Now there will be a day, I think it's coming really fast, when somebody probably be an insurance company, because they're the most motivated and the most efficient at what they do. They will, they'll develop a tool that can be pointed at the body of case documents, the transcripts, the documents, the whatnot, and someone who's smart can coax out of that tool of chronology, like who did what? Tell me what's important in this case, what are the best facts, what are the worst facts? And I think that day is coming soon, and what lawyers will need to learn how to do is how to extract the most useful information from these tools. The tools will be dumb, but they can be taught and prompting lawyers will become very highly skilled, sophisticated prompt engineers and the it'll be a kind of a leveler. Every law firm, small and large will be able to afford the technology. And what will distinguish what will distinguish lawyers is the quality of their presentation, their strategy and their skill in a courtroom. So that's prediction one. Prediction two is that the billable hour will become almost irrelevant. And the reason I say that is because the value that a lawyer brings is more and more measured by the insight that he or she can bring to bear on a problem, the experience that they have, the strategy that they have, the skill that they can exercise in a boardroom or in a courtroom or At a negotiating table, and the number of hours, in and of itself, will not necessarily correlate to the value that they deliver. Now, the demise of the billable hour has been predicted for longer than I've been practicing, and everyone who has predicted it has been wrong, and I'll probably be wrong too. So. That's another prediction, and a third one is that the law business will undergo even more concentration and consolidation than today. There will be a time when the accounting firm the corporate practice of law, which is currently outlawed in the United States, that will fade away, and just like it already has in the UK, and there will be investors, private money will come and and the margins in the law business are too large for private equity to ignore. And if they are given a chance, there will be a number of private equity investors that will want a piece of the action in law firms, and the only thing keeping them from it is our current legal regime. I think that will probably change also, because there's a tremendous need for capital in this business that it's difficult to find capital, except through partner contributions these days, and private equity will be a solution to that. At least two will be wrong, though,.

Austen Parrish 16:16
I was gonna say, I see people. My guess is our listeners are smart. Some listeners are smiling about the prediction of the end of the billable hour, and perhaps are not smiling about the increase of private equity into the into the market. If you see the law firms as corporatizing in some way, in the big changes in the 80s that you described it, the professionalization, but also the sort of the big business of law. In some ways, it does seem that in a number of areas that big businesses then moved into private equity, you may well be right and how that goes.

Mark Samuels 16:41
Private equity is already deep into litigation funding, for example, because a lot of a lot of cases really can't be brought without a source of funding. Private equity is there, and they're doing quite a bit of it now.

Austen Parrish 16:57
We're having a lot of these conversations in the law school about how you prepare students. Because I think if we go back to your first point, your first point, which means that this high level thinking, the sort of making sure that we're preparing students for long term as well as the short term, is going to be so critical, but at the same time, we need to think more about how we provide students the skills on understanding how AI is impacting the world, and as you say, how to be good prompters, or at least how to manipulate or use those tools in an effective way. Our big challenge is that it keeps changing so quickly, it's hard to get your hands we like to pass a new course within a semester, not within a day.

Mark Samuels 17:31
We have a team of people that all they do all day long. They're not lawyers, but all they do all day long is look at the products that are out there in the market that are geared toward our industry, and same things going on in every industry. So there's AI generated tools every day that you know are coming online. I was the last generation of lawyers that didn't have Lexus. We learned how to research by Key Number system and shepardizing with books. It's remarkable how the practice has changed.

Austen Parrish 18:08
Yeah, I don't know if you know this. We actually Ali Shahidi, who's you're ahead of I'm going to get this wrong, but managing director for information innovation, yeah, he's teaching a course for us right now on modern legal practice management to using AI specifically with an AI focus. He's terrific.

Mark Samuels 18:24
He's got a large group of people around here who just love to listen to every word that comes out of his mouth. He's very knowledgeable.

Austen Parrish 18:32
I attended one of the classes, and it's, it was fabulous, and the students did interesting presentations. But it's also, it's scary how quickly things are changing. I'll keep track. I got a feeling you might get two out of three, but we'll see. We'll see what happens. You mentioned about some of the changes in the legal profession more broadly, and also how Orange County has developed. Maybe we could return to that. I know you were based in the Los Angeles office for many years, but have also long lived in Orange County. What has been your experience about Orange County's growth as a market and its growth as a major area where law firms and the legal community interact. I have to say, I had a very different view of Orange County when I first moved to Los Angeles in the 90s compared to where I see it today.

Mark Samuels 19:13
We own a home in Orange County the last 12 or so years, and even in the relatively brief time we've been there, I'm struck by how much Orange County has grown and and prospered. It's become a very sophisticated legal market. That wasn't always true, and it suffered from its proximity to Los Angeles, and now it's it is a legal community, a very strong and vibrant one in its own right. There are some of the largest innovation companies in Southern California are in Orange County, and we were there all the time, and have been for years. And I expect there's going to be there's more to come. One of the reasons is that it's very attractive place to live. And to raise a family, and that brings engineers and entrepreneurs and other people that can, that can cause a tech community to flourish. And that's what we've seen in Orange County in spades. And I think we're more we're in the third inning of that. It's there's a lot more to come.

Austen Parrish 20:20
Yeah, that's I keep hearing the same thing. My friend, who's a former federal judge, says the two most important things, though, in Orange County was the building of the federal courthouse and the creation of UC Irvine law. I like that quote just for selfish reasons, but I think it does reflect the maturation of a really exciting sort of legal market. One of the things we spent a lot of time here talking with our students is the importance of public service, not only as part of the profession, but as a way to get ahead as a lawyer, and that's important whether you're working at a small firm, nonprofit or even large firms. I know you've long served as a member of the board for Public Counsel, and I believe Public Counsel is the largest provider of pro bono legal services in the United States, and perhaps the first bar sponsored public interest law firm in the US too. Can you talk a little bit about your community engagement and how you got involved with Public Counsel, and how you see it as part of your sort of professional idenity?

Mark Samuels 21:10
Public Counsel was founded long ago by some law firm leaders. I think O’Melveny & Myers was one of them. We've had a long association with Public Counsel, my own personal connection to it one of my first pro bono cases as a young lawyer. It was a mortgage fraud case that I handled through Public Counsel, and I was really struck by the dedication of their professional staff and the lawyers who work there. It so happens that a mentee of mine, who's now a federal judge himself a mentee of mine. Ernan Vera, I think you may know him from your time. Left O’Melveny & Myers to become the CEO of Public Counsel, and he asked me at some point to join their board, and I gratefully accepted that invitation. And it's been incredibly rewarding to see every year how that organization has grown, how many different kinds of law they practice. There are real specialists in everything that they do, from immigration to death penalty appeals and many other areas of legal services, and it's just a tremendous community resource. It so happens that my wife is on the board of a similar organization in New Orleans, and they are really it's a much smaller city, a much smaller legal community. They are trying to emulate what public council has done, because it's been so successful, and so I'm very proud of the work they do. And one of the most rewarding things is to attend their annual dinner, where, in addition to raising the bulk of their contributions, they also bring out some clients of Public Counsel to tell their stories, and there's never a dry eye in the house, and you feel so good about what our people, which is what I think of as the Public Counsel family, what our people have done to change lives, and very important part of what a lawyer does.

Austen Parrish 23:19
Those stories are amazing, and the impact is really significant. But maybe you could talk a little bit more about why it's important, even for attorneys at large law firms or large corporate law firms to get involved in their communities and get involved with organizations like Public Counsel or many of the other legal aid and public interest organizations here in Southern California, my sense is it's always been critical, but I'd love to get your opinion.

Mark Samuels 23:43
Yeah, it is critical, and I'm going to give a high minded answer, and then I'm going to give a practical, mercantile answer to the same question. Of course, we're trained to pursue justice at a lawyer's training. We occupy a really special place in a society, and rights can't be vindicated without the assistance of a skilled lawyer. It's a lawyer's obligation to take those skills and use them for the benefit of their community, because no one else can. And there are so many wrongs that can't be addressed without the service of a lawyer, and even if every single lawyer did 20 or 50 hours of pro bono service, there would still be tremendous amount of unmet needs in our society. So it's the right thing to do. It's the quid pro quo for having the license that we have is that we have to use that license, not just for commercial purposes, not just to earn a living, but also to do justice, especially for those who don't have access themselves. The mercantile answer is that I found that the association. Connection with pro bono organizations, and I've been involved with several of them over time, helps you develop a network. And one of the most important things a lawyer needs if they're going to be in private practice, but even if they're not, is a network of professional colleagues, people that you can law at its best, it should be a collegial profession. There's a certain civility that lawyers are expected to exhibit by having a strong network. You can go anywhere and know people, and they will be referral sources for you. They will be validators of your skill and your judgment, and I've benefited a lot from the professional connections that I've made with lawyers on boards and other walks of life, and not just law organizations, but community service of all different kinds. I'm on several non profit boards, and people you meet there are not necessarily lawyers, but they're all people that enrich you and that will be a source of referrals to you and will be a will validate you as a as a member of this legal community.

Austen Parrish 26:17
I'm also assuming these days that given the nature of the larger cases and how few go to trial, your ability to get actual trial experience as a young attorney at the very largest firms is probably pretty limited. Not that it doesn't happen, but, but I'm assuming that also sometimes the pro bono experiences ways to build great skills on client interviewing and being able to have an opportunity maybe to first chair a trial in a way that you probably aren't going to do with a paying client in your first couple of years out of practice. Years out of practice?

Mark Samuels 26:43
Yeah, absolutely. And I think the many law firms, the larger law firms, have relationships with district attorneys or public defender offices, and we will send lawyers out to the Manhattan Beach da for a day a week for a period of months, and they get handed a file and sent to a courtroom, and they try a case, and you don't get that experience in a law firm. You absolutely don't. You learn self confidence, you learn your way around a courtroom, and you get experience it's very hard to come by, as the cost of litigation is so high that very few cases are substantial enough to make their way all the way through trial. So you're right about acquiring experience. This is a great way.

Austen Parrish 27:31
I like to see it the same way that you do that there's moral and sort of professional reasons why you should do pro bono in public service. But I actually think it's also, even if you're purely somebody who's entirely selfish and is just looking at you, you still should be doing it, because it it helps you in lots of different ways, both for networking, building clients and actually getting the skills you need and training. Look at what advice do you have for young lawyers, or at least what advice for students who are working as summer associates. Are there things that you'd recommend from your years or things you've seen with young lawyers who've been successful that you'd pass on?

Mark Samuels 28:03
So this doesn't come off preachy or anything, but the first piece of advice is to find something you enjoy and are good at. The law practice can really be a grind if you don't like what you do and you're not successful at it, everybody has the potential to find satisfaction and to find success in an area of the law, and finding it is number one goal. Should be everyone's number one goal. The second piece of advice to me is that law is a mentorship profession. It's hard to appreciate that when you're in law school, you come out of law school you have a license, but you really don't know how to practice law. What you learn from other lawyers is that are more senior to you is what will make you an actual lawyer. And so finding a mentor, picking one. And I think those things are incredibly important. I was fortunate to have some great mentors as a young lawyer, and I consider it to be one obligation that I have as a senior lawyer to take younger lawyers under my wing, but not everybody. Not every mentorship clicks. You've got to find somebody whose personality and style resonate with you, but you want to look for somebody who's who's ethical and who's got skills. And that is a really important thing to me. And then I would also add to that, it's important to try to maintain some balance in your life, some outside interests, some don't short your family or your friends. Clients can be friends. And most successful business development, I know, is to make friends with your clients, and make clients of your friends and maintaining. Some life outside your office is incredibly important in the category of do what I say and not what I do. The biggest failing I had as a young lawyer was I got so consumed in my work that I lost track of childhood, college friends, even law school friends, and after a while, it gets awkward to pick up the phone and call somebody that you haven't talked to in three years. My excuse for myself is that in my day, there was no email, there was no social networking. You literally had to pick up the phone and call someone. Young Lawyers today have a million ways they can stay in touch with people if they want to, and I think doing that is incredibly important. Again, it's network building. It will enrich your life, and it's good business.

Austen Parrish 30:52
Yeah, I have to say, when I graduated, I didn't realize how quickly classmates who started with summer associates, as you were, would soon go in house or change their careers, and then actually be critical as part of, as you say, this business network. And looking back, I was stunned actually, how quickly that happened. And as you say, keeping those connections can make a major difference, just from referrals and getting connected in a broader way. Looking back, knowing what you know now, are there things you would have done differently in law school, opportunities you wish you had taken advantage of when you were a law student, not so much for the person who's graduated and starting at the firm, but just thinking about your own law school experience. Are there things you'd recommend students think about?

Mark Samuels 31:29
I loved law school. I really did enjoy it immensely. If I had to do it over again, I would probably focus less on bar courses, because some of those courses you can easily learn in your bar preparation, but some of the courses that I didn't take, I wish I had just your luck and fortuity. I ended up in a practice that's at the intersection of IP and economics. I never took an econ class in law school, I neglected the antitrust course. I didn't take the IP course that I should have taken. Those would have enriched me a lot more than maybe a bar course I could have learned the summer before the bar exam. That's my biggest regret about law school.

Austen Parrish 32:19
That's good advice, although I have to say it's also it's an inspiring story too. You've had this amazing career in areas that you never had any background. When I talk to people, alumni and others, it's amazing how many people didn't predict their career as it ended up turning out to be. And having that sort of broad base so that you can flexibly adjust to the new opportunities on the horizon is what happens these days with large number of people. It's rare when I have some meet somebody in there, like my there like I knew exactly when I entered law school that I'd be doing what I'm doing now, 10,20, 30,40, years later.

Mark Samuels 32:48
We talked earlier about the specialization in law, just my father was a physician, and in the days the 50s, when he went to medical school, doctors Didn't they were like surgeons or family doctors, there wasn't very much specialization then compared to now. And same is true in law. There's incredible amount of specialization. And clients aren't just looking for smart people. They want somebody who's experienced in their field. And so I decry that in some ways, but it's a fact of life, so the specialization is not going away.

Austen Parrish 33:26
Yeah, we worry a little bit about that, about how quickly you have to make decisions, right? It used to be that you'd have your whole first year of law school, you didn't really have to worry about what you were doing in undergraduate. And then first year would be just foundational. And then you start thinking about in your second and third year. Our sense now is that firms are interviewing students out of kindergarten to try to figure out if they're good for their summer associate program. Everything's moved back so quickly, and so it does put a lot of pressure on people to be thinking even and even frankly, in early years of undergraduate as to what they want to do and what the background is, which is a little worrisome that there's that much pressure on students that early on in their careers.

Mark Samuels 34:01
I don't know if this will be comfort or not to your students, but I am rarely impressed by somebody who has a very clear, firm view of what they want to do, because they're almost certainly, almost certainly don't know enough to have that view. I prefer somebody who's curious and interested in everything, and I think that's a good way to be. And the other thing is that practices change over time. Congress can change your practice. Can obliterate your practice in the blink of an eye, or can create a practice just as quickly. And so being versatile, having a lot of broad interest. I think that's really important. It's made practice. For me, really interesting. I've never had two cases that were alike. For me, routine is not great. So I enjoy the challenge of a different industry, a different technology, a different area of the law, and I think a lot of. A lot of lawyers feel the same way.

Austen Parrish 35:01
Great advice and what a great way to end the conversation. Thank you so much for joining us and being on UCI law talks. Really enjoyed the conversation. My pleasure.

Outro 35:15
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