Welcome to Original Jurisdiction, the latest legal publication by me, David Lat. You can learn more about Original Jurisdiction by reading its About page, and you can email me at davidlat@substack.com. This is a reader-supported publication; you can subscribe by clicking here.
I’ve interviewed many law firm leaders on this podcast, usually from one of two extremes: brand-new boutiques or long-established Biglaw institutions. But the most interesting moment in a firm’s history may be the middle—when the early bets have paid off, but the long-term trajectory is still unfolding.
That’s where Glenn Agre Bergman & Fuentes is today. Founded in February 2021, in the depths of the pandemic, the firm is now one of the nation’s leading boutiques—and recently marked its fifth anniversary with a celebration at The Pool, a fabulous venue inside the landmark Seagram Building.
I was there at the invitation of my longtime friend Jed Bergman—a former Wachtell Lipton colleague and co-founder of Glenn Agre, where he recently became the chair of litigation. After catching up at the party, I invited Jed to join me on the podcast to talk about what it’s like to be five years into building a firm.
Five years is a revealing moment: long enough to have learned lessons, but early enough that the future remains wide open. Jed and I discussed why he and his partners launched Glenn Agre, what he knows now that he didn’t then, where the firm is headed—and why he thinks AI could give boutiques a competitive edge over Biglaw.
Congratulations to Jed and his partners on the milestone—and best of luck in the years ahead.
Show Notes:
Jed I. Bergman bio, Glenn Agre Bergman & Fuentes LLP
Jed Bergman profile, Legal 500
Jed I. Bergman Appointed Chair of Litigation Department at Glenn Agre Bergman & Fuentes LLP, PR Newswire
Prefer reading to listening? For paid subscribers, a transcript of the entire episode appears below.
Sponsored by:
NexFirm helps Biglaw attorneys become founding partners. To learn more about how NexFirm can help you launch your firm, call 212-292-1000 or email careerdevelopment@nexfirm.com.
Three quick notes about this transcript. First, it has been cleaned up from the audio in ways that don’t alter substance—e.g., by deleting verbal filler or adding a word here or there to clarify meaning. Second, my interviewee has not reviewed this transcript, and any errors are mine. Third, because of length constraints, this newsletter may be truncated in email; to view the entire post, simply click on “View entire message” in your email app.
David Lat: Welcome to the Original Jurisdiction podcast. I’m your host, David Lat, author of a Substack newsletter about law and the legal profession also named Original Jurisdiction, which you can read and subscribe to at davidlat.substack.com. You’re listening to the ninety-third episode of this podcast, recorded on Thursday, March 14.
Thanks to this podcast’s sponsor, NexFirm. NexFirm helps Biglaw attorneys become founding partners. To learn more about how NexFirm can help you launch your firm, call 212-292-1000 or email careerdevelopment@nexfirm.com. Want to know who the guest will be for the next Original Jurisdiction podcast? Follow NexFirm on LinkedIn for a preview.
On a Thursday evening last month, I found myself at The Pool, inside the iconic Seagram Building, for an amazing event: a celebration of the fifth anniversary of Glenn Agre Bergman & Fuentes, one of the nation’s leading litigation boutiques. I was there at the invitation of my friend Jed Bergman, a former colleague from Wachtell Lipton who went on to co-found Glenn Agre, where he’s now chair of the litigation department.
Jed and I had a fascinating conversation that covered many topics, from the rise of boutique firms to the AI revolution—which Jed believes will benefit boutiques more than Biglaw. I thought that some of his insights would interest the OJ audience, so I invited him to join me on the show. Without further ado, here’s my conversation with Jed Bergman.
Jed, thank you so much for joining me.
Jed I. Bergman: My pleasure, David. It’s great to see you in this capacity as opposed to the other ones over the years.
DL: Let’s start at the beginning. Tell us about your background and upbringing. Where did you grow up?
JIB: I grew up in Brooklyn. My dad was an immigrant; my mom grew up in Brooklyn also. In fact, she’s turning 80 and has never lived outside of Brooklyn (not that I made it that far). I went to NYU for undergrad, did a degree in finance, worked for a couple of years between college and law school for a foundation doing something different, went to Columbia Law School, and clerked for a year after that for Judge Amalya Kearse on the Second Circuit. After that, it was eight years at Wachtell Lipton—and that’s just counting in normal years, not dog years—followed by a good stretch at Kasowitz. And in 2021, my partners and I started Glenn Agre Bergman & Fuentes. So that’s the quick overview; I’m happy to dip into any part of it that you’d like.
DL: So let’s rewind a little bit. One thing I’m typically curious about for my guests is what led you to go to law school. Did you have any early exposure to law or any lawyers in the family?
JIB: No lawyers in the family. There were a lot of teachers, some civil servants, things like that. In fact, the only person in my extended family who is a lawyer isn’t someone I really knew growing up. But you’ll appreciate this based on some of the stories you’ve shared in your Original Jurisdiction newsletter. I was one of those precocious kids who liked to argue a lot. My mom was a teacher at the school where I went to school, so she knew all of my teachers, and more than one of them said to her, “Oh, your son will be a lawyer someday.” At the time, I thought that was a compliment. Now that I’ve raised children of my own, I realized it is a compliment, but it’s definitely a backhanded one. That may have started me on the path. I’ve always loved to read, I love to write, I love to argue, and I’ve wanted to be what I am now in many ways for as long as I was thinking about career aspirations. And I consider myself really lucky in that way.
DL: It’s interesting: some people’s careers have taken surprising turns, while other folks have in some ways come into what they thought for a long time they would do. It sounds like your path in many ways conformed to what you expected.
So we overlapped when we worked together at Wachtell Lipton many moons ago. It’s obviously a very storied firm, and it has a mystique to it. How would you describe your years there?
JIB: If I had to pick a single word, it’s probably “formative.” So much of the lawyer that I am today, and in the last five years, so much of the law firm founder that I am today, grows out of my experience at Wachtell. It’s a hardworking environment, obviously, although my take was that you’re not working twice as hard as you would be at some other Biglaw firms; you’re probably working harder, but there are only so many hours in the day. Everything from the culture of excellence to the willingness to be creative and think about legal strategy creatively and latch onto something that could change the entire course of a case, even if it’s just a word in a contract, stems from there. And as I mentioned, having started a law firm now, I really am guided by a lot of the things that I have seen work very well at Wachtell Lipton from the way that it was founded.
I actually went back and met with Marty Lipton a couple of years after starting Glenn Agre. I realized at some point that one of my full-time jobs is now law firm founder and long-term succession planner, and I said, “I might as well go learn from the master.” And he was, as he always is, incredibly gracious with his time and his advice. It was a moment of coming full circle for me to go back and meet with him and sit with him, founder to founder. And the truth is our Wachtell relationship remains a strong and important one for us at Glenn Agre. We have a lot of friends there. We’re able to take on some conflict matters that they don’t, some other matters that aren’t really a good fit for them. So it’s a very important relationship and really, really core to my identity in many ways as a lawyer.
DL: Wachtell is one of a small number of Am Law 100 firms where the founders are actually still around. And I wonder, maybe it’s no coincidence that a number of Wachtell alums have gone on to become founders. I previously had our mutual friend, David Elsberg of Elsberg Baker & Maruri, on the podcast. Of course, you are a founder. I’m even a founder, of a small publication (actually, well, Above the Law before Original Jurisdiction wasn’t that small). So there’s an entrepreneurial aspect to the firm. What were some of the things about managing or running a firm that you took away either from your experience of being at Wachtell or from chatting with Marty Lipton?
JIB: Great question. And I do think being at a firm with its founding generation still active shows you that that can be done. Both you and Mr. Elsberg have one up on me because you are both serial founders at this point. I founded one law firm and have no plans to do anything else on that front, but we’re reinventing ourselves every day; maybe that counts.
The lessons that I look at now as a founder are things that I absorbed by osmosis then and reflected on later. And when I went back to meet with Marty Lipton, there were four takeaways, three rational and one emotional.
The rational takeaways were first, you’ve just got to work super hard, just super, super hard, and because it’s your thing that comes easily, but there’s no substitute for the work. The second is there’s no guarantee of success. We look at Wachtell Lipton, but we see it—especially people of our generation—when it had already become what it was. And that’s the third, which is, you’ve got to get lucky. And if you work hard enough, maybe you make your own luck, but you’ve got to get lucky. And all of that was shared. Those are the three rational takeaways.
Here’s the emotional takeaway—and I’ll share this because it’s totally true to form, and I’m happy to share it. At the end of the interview, Marty basically said to me, “We’re all rooting for you. We all want to see you succeed.” And that desire to see other people succeed and the sense of satisfaction and pride that you see in watching your junior partners, your associates, and your former colleagues go on to success is something that is important to what we’re building at Glenn Agre, both for those who will stay with us and grow up here and one day succeed us, as is my hope, but also for those who leave. People leave here as friends, as colleagues, and we are rooting for them. And that kind of cultural lesson, which is not universal among law firm founders, that commitment to succession planning, is another piece of that. It’s the same kind of thing. It’s like, “It’s not just me. The firm is bigger than me. And if I want it to thrive in the world, I need to see it that way.” So that’s a bit of a long answer and there’s more, but I’ll stop there.
DL: I have a couple of thoughts in response. On your first point, I totally agree. I compare starting a boutique firm to launching a startup: it takes a huge amount of work, and there’s always more work that you could do. On your emotional takeaway, I also totally agree. Wachtell is relatively small by the standards of Am Law 100 or so-called Biglaw firms, with 250 lawyers maybe. And I do think it does feel, including the alumni, like an extended family. When I had my very dire Covid experience, I heard from so many people from Wachtell—former Wachtell lawyers and current Wachtell lawyers, including Marty, this titan of the bar who took the time to reach out to me. So I totally agree with you on that as well.
So after Wachtell, you went to the firm now known as Kasowitz. It has had different name changes over the years. At one point it was Kasowitz Benson Torres & Friedman, which is how I think of it because that was during a formative time for me. What was your experience like at Kasowitz?
JIB: I was at Kasowitz for about 15 or 16 years. That’s a long time, and so there were stages of my experience there. When I joined Kasowitz, it was indeed Kasowitz Benson Torres & Friedman. The name changed for the first time when David Friedman was appointed ambassador to Israel, and he came off the letterhead. I recently saw someone who had a legal pad that had the full name at the top, and I said, “That’s vintage. Don’t use that. That’s going to be worth something someday.”
Kasowitz is where I grew up as a partner. I learned a tremendous amount there. Marc Kasowitz is an incredibly talented lawyer. I learned a lot from working closely with him. That firm went through growth cycles and stages. I made very close friends there. We’ll talk, as we cycle through this, about the founding of Glenn Agre, and how the seven of us who founded the firm were all partners at Kasowitz for a bunch of years before that.
Here’s an interesting thing. You were at Wachtell, so you remember that certainly in our day, it was almost exclusively people who had grown up inside the firm. I used to joke it was like a British boarding school: everybody knew you when you were a kid. Kasowitz grew differently. It was founded in a different time and grew much more through lateral hiring. There’s a real cross-pollination of approaches and ideas that happens when partners, associates also, but partners who have grown up elsewhere, come together and practice together. So something is lost in that they haven’t all grown up from summer associate to partnership together, but something important is gained, which is different ways of doing things, different ways of thinking about practice, different ways of striking balances between, let’s call it “street smarts” versus “book smarts.” And I really absorbed that lesson at Kasowitz because I saw it there in a way that I hadn’t until then.
DL: That is such an interesting point. I had not thought of that, because when people talk about firms that mainly homegrow their talent, like Wachtell, and firms that do a lot of lateral hiring, people often present the former model as somehow superior because you have these really bonds. But I hadn’t thought about the cross-pollination point. That’s super interesting—and we will return to that when we shift very shortly to the founding of Glenn Agre Bergman & Fuentes. But before we do that, in terms of your substantive career as a lawyer, as opposed to a founder and business owner, what would you say is a matter or representation of which you are particularly proud?
JIB: So I’ve been doing this for a while and I don’t want to bore anybody with war stories, but I’ll give you two, only because one of them touches you as well, and I’ll move through them quickly.
Many years ago, in the aftermath of 9/11, you and I and a huge cast of characters were involved in litigating the insurance coverage over the Twin Towers. Obviously the loss of life was the most important thing—but there was property insurance, nevertheless, and I think they probably teach this case in law school now. The core issue was, was it one or two occurrences for insurance purposes—which meant, do you get $3 billion of coverage, or twice that? So it was a case that we litigated against some 24 insurance companies on a short timeframe. It was massive. I now joke, “I’ve done one insurance case, but it was a doozy.” People ask me, “Well, how did it come out? Was it one or two?” And I tell them, “Well, actually there were two different trials. One jury said it was one occurrence. One jury said it was two occurrences. So take your pick.” It was a case that taught me a lot about everything from how choices in the first days of a case can play out forever to how a team, and not an enormous team compared to some cases you read about now, can handle an enormous matter, and how esprit de corps can carry you a very long way. So that’s one.
I’ll give you a second one very quickly, only because it’s a Glenn Agre matter and I have to talk about it. This has been on LinkedIn and it’s all public, so I’ll mention names. We handled a couple of related matters for a client of ours called Vector Capital, which was a lender to a company called Anthology. We were brought in initially on the defense side—and we’re more or less 50/50—of a New York state court kind of “failure to fund” the case. While that was happening, the company filed for bankruptcy. Our two core practice areas are complex commercial litigation and bankruptcy and restructuring, people swing back and forth between the two, and we interweave our teams regularly. And this was a perfect opportunity to do exactly that, to figure out how best to assert leverage in the bankruptcy in the context of the financing and various plan objections and so on, ultimately resulting in a resolution that we thought was an excellent result for our client—and our client thought so as well. And I’m proud of it because it showcased our ability to be creative; to swing from one forum to another; to recognize that much as we love going to trial, our clients really have business problems that they need solved; and to deliver those results.
DL: That’s a great example. And I totally agree with all the points you derived from it. So turning to Glenn Agre Bergman & Fuentes….
JIB: You can skip the “Bergman & Fuentes.” I’ve made my peace with it—I love my partners—as long as people say “Agre” right. You and I had an exchange about this, because law firm pronunciation is not always obvious. Agre is commonly mispronounced—I won’t even bore you with the number of different ways—but as long as you’re pronouncing it Glenn Agre, you don’t need to repeat the Bergman & Fuentes.
DL: Well, it is interesting what firms end up getting known by, because the trend in law firm marketing is to go shorter. Some firms go by the first name, like Proskauer or Skadden. Some go by the second name as well—Wachtell, Wachtell Lipton, it kind of goes back and forth, even Skadden is sometimes referred to as Skadden Arps. So what led you and your partners to strike out on your own and launch Glenn Agre?
JIB: The answer has to start with the fact that it was Covid. We started the firm officially in February 2021. Obviously there was a kind of lead-up to that. And I’m just going to say as an aside how glad I am to see you every time I’ve seen you since then, up and around and able and everything else, how glad I am for that. We were all very worried about you; I do want to say that. Even for those of us who passed through that time in relative health, it was a rupture point in all that had come before. It was a time to reexamine what the future would look like. It was also a time where we were not in the office at all for a long period of time, which has an impact on which social bonds fray and which deepen as a matter of greater intentionality.
If you’re not in the office every day, you’re not seeing all the people on your hall; the people you are seeing are the ones that you make it a point to reach out to and who make it a point to reach out to you. And so in that way, Covid reinforced the bonds that the group of us that founded the firm had, and we had worked on a bunch of things together internally. It was a moment for me where I examined, as I think others did, what does the future look like? When you’re in your 20s, even in your late 20s or early 30s, and you’re choosing a firm, making partner and so on, you’re not necessarily thinking 20, 30, 40 years down the road of a career. And what’s exciting about a young firm when you join it over time becomes a question of what does the future look like? What does the future of this firm look like?
And I will say it, and you can call me on this when we do this next time: succession planning and execution is probably the single hardest thing for first-generation businesses, including law firms, to do. It just wasn’t clear to me what that was going to look like. And it felt like a moment to try to take more control over my own destiny. I give Andrew Glenn credit as the progenitor of the idea. I got a call one Thursday, kind of out of the blue, and then I took the weekend to think about it and discuss it with my wife. And I felt like we could give this a shot; I felt ready to step into the role. My business case was, I have enough relationships over the years with people at other firms and clients and so on, that once I was out on my own and we were out on our own, those relationships would come—as they have. I’m very grateful for that.
Also, there was some safety in numbers. We were a group of seven founding partners. There was enough of a sense that if there’s something one of us can’t handle, someone else can pick up that ball and run with it. And those were the things that kind of said, “Okay, let’s give it a shot. Let’s give it a shot.”
DL: And what was your vision for Glenn Agre at the time of its launch? What did you think it was going to do or be in a different way compared to, say, Kasowitz or Wachtell, the firms you had been at before?
JIB: The very short answer, David, is I had no idea. It’s easy to look back and say, “Oh yes, the vision was this.” But there was no strategic plan. There was no binder full of, “Here’s how we get from A to B to C to D.” I think what there was was a culture and a shared group dedication to trying to do some things differently than some of the models we’ve seen over the years. I don’t want to say that this was a no to Kasowitz or a yes to Kasowitz or Wachtell. It was more complicated than that and more distilled. It was important to us and remains important to us to build a firm that was based on genuine relationships with one another, with the people who join us, with our clients, in a different way with our adversaries—not our enemies, our adversaries.
We’re building for the long term. And what that means is that while matters come and matters go and clients come and clients go, it’s never transactional from our perspective. We’re looking to build on a stronger foundation than that and build better as a result. I mentioned earlier that we love going to trial. Clients want their business problems solved. We try to keep that front and center. Beyond that, we were looking to build and are looking to build a firm where everyone feels like a founder and everyone’s invested in the growth of the firm. And look, five years is not a lot of time. There are a lot of hours in there, but it’s not a lot of time. Everybody who has joined us has made a deliberate decision to join someplace in the first five years of its life. And lawyers are not by nature risk-takers. If you want to be a risk-taker, you don’t go to law school; you go to Silicon Valley or something else.
But people have chosen to join us and build with us. And it’s important to us that everybody feel like they are a founder too, like they’re part of the business-development story of the firm, like they’re part of the relationship-developing core of the firm, both internally and externally. And we thought that in that sense, along with the things that are kind of table stakes—the excellence, the strategy, the skills, the grit, all of those things that really are the starting point at this level of legal practice—that’s what we thought we had the ability to deliver, and to deliver a product in a way that we thought where there was room to do it.
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You mentioned, of course, the fifth anniversary, and you talked about the importance of relationships in terms of the founding of the firm. And when I attended your amazing fifth anniversary party, I definitely detected that, just in terms of both the one-on-one and smaller interactions I had with people and also the speeches that you and your co-founders made. So five years is great. It is a milestone. I don’t know what the statistics are in terms of boutique law firms, but maybe it’s a bit like restaurants: they don’t all last. So it’s very impressive that you’ve made it here, and I’m sure there are many more years ahead. But let me ask you this. What do you know now about launching a firm that you wish you knew five years ago?
JIB: Great question, David. So first of all, there were some things I wish I knew 10 years ago and 15 years ago. Those really include how much fun it is, how completely invigorating it is, how emotionally rewarding it is to be building your own law firm, and to a much greater extent, representing your own clients as yourself and as a firm that is yours. I’m not saying I would’ve been ready to do it 10 or 15 years ago, but I wish I had known that, because I am one of those people who did not go to law school to be an entrepreneur. I’ve ended up as professionally what I thought I would always be. I never thought I would start a law firm; that part’s new.
But you asked about five years ago, so let me speak to that. Five years ago—and some of this is hindsight—I did not appreciate the importance of investing in administration, whether that’s software or personnel. Because anytime you start a business, you want to watch every penny, but there is such a thing as penny-wise and pound-foolish. And if you’re able to start in a way where there’s actually cash coming in pretty quickly, it really is worth it to make sure you have the back office people, the systems, to free the lawyers up to do more of the practice and more of the business generating as opposed to doing that other stuff. That’s one thing I wish I knew.
And this is really hindsight because when we started, we were super busy. We needed to hire. We hired quickly because we didn’t have the luxury of taking three or four months to find the perfect candidate. We just needed bodies. And that’s changing with AI, which I’m sure we’ll talk about in a little bit. But we’ve become more thoughtful and intentional in our hiring process. Our people are great, top to bottom; this is a comment on what we’ve learned about how we figure out what we want. So my advice to people starting would be, look, if you can bridge the gap in the short term while taking the time to make sure you find the people who really are the right fit, that pays dividends as well.
DL: I totally agree with your point about administration and business of law, so here’s a shameless plug for our sponsor, NexFirm. They help lawyers who have the practice and the clients and the talents, but would like some help on the administrative stuff, and it’s really plug and play. So listeners, if you reach out to NexFirm, tell them you heard about them from the Original Jurisdiction podcast.
But anyway, going to your point also about hiring, I think that’s also so true. And a lot of times when people start something, whether it’s a law firm or any other business, they’re just trying to keep the lights on, and there’s not necessarily a lot of intentionality that goes into systems design, which is why it’s just so interesting to hear you say what you did about coming up with these things. So I’m curious: how big in terms of headcount is Glenn Agre right now, in terms of lawyers and also other professionals?
JIB: We are right around 40 lawyers. I don’t know if we’re just over or just under, but right around 40 lawyers—and professionals, not as many as my prior comment about what I’ve learned might suggest, but I’m going to say more than five, fewer than ten. We could probably use more support there, but it is a little bit chicken and egg. And we’re still a small business in many ways, so some of the lessons that I’m sharing are things I wish I had known five years ago; that doesn’t mean they’re lessons I’ve fully internalized today. So I’m a little bit giving “today me” a pep talk about the same things that I would’ve told “me from five years ago.” But look, when people say how big is the firm, I say 40 lawyers, give or take, and I tell them we started five years ago with seven, and it’s been great.
DL: That is quite a nice growth rate. Do you have a vision for where the firm would ultimately end up, either in terms of the size of it or other qualities or characteristics of it? I guess another way of putting it is, what do you expect or hope Glenn Agre to be if we talk five years from now?
JIB: This is sort of like, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I think if you spoke to the group of founding partners today, there’d be a lot of alignment, but also some difference as far as size and so on. Look, I am, as we all are, a product of my upbringing professionally in this context. Wachtell has always only been one office. We’re two: we were in both New York and San Francisco from the start, and I like that approach. Everyone works on cases from both, so it’s really integrated. I don’t see us growing at the same rate in the near future; I think that will slow a little bit. Part of that is AI, which I want to make sure we talk about because I think it’ll have more of an impact on the shape of Biglaw than on the shape of boutiques, but it will shape hiring in general.
Turning now to the kind of Kasowitz piece of my upbringing, I’ve always liked a model that is litigation-centric. Even with our bankruptcy/restructuring practice, a lot of it touches on litigation. I’ve always loved the idea that the person in the office to my right or to my left does the same thing that I do, and we can bounce ideas off one another. That builds a certain kind of sense of professional community.
So five years from now, I do think we’ll be bigger. We’re interested in continued organic growth. As far as what we’re doing, from my own perspective, it’s still litigation of one kind or another, along with bankruptcy and restructuring and adjacent areas. I’m not opposed to building a corporate practice; I think how you do that in an AI world is changing also. And we can talk about boutiques and what kinds of boutiques are starting and how might that change. It’s all one conversation. But really, five years from now, I want to be having this much fun, and I want everybody that I work with to be having this much fun because we’re happy warriors, and that drives both professional satisfaction and great results for our clients.
DL: So it’s interesting what you were saying earlier about your lawyer-to-staff ratio. That may reflect that you are a fairly young firm because a lot of older firms have larger professional staffs, and sadly, a lot of them have had to let go some of their staff because of technology. You no longer need one assistant or secretary for two or three lawyers; now you can have one administrative assistant working with many lawyers. I recently saw a talk by a partner who said that when he started, I forget how many decades ago, he shared an assistant with one other lawyer, and now, at the same firm, it’s something like five or six lawyers working with an administrative assistant.
Let’s talk about AI, because it’s clearly something to which you have given a significant amount of thought. My first question is, how are you and your colleagues at Glenn Agre using it, in terms of either your practice as litigators or in terms of founding and running the firm as a business?
JIB: On the litigation side, we looked at a number of products. We, along with lots of other firms out there, are using Harvey, and we’re very happy with it.
Lawyers tend to be technology-averse. I don’t consider myself on the bleeding edge of new technology, but at some point the light bulb went off and we started thinking, “Well, if we don’t get ahead of this wave, we’re going to be crushed by it.” So it’s a running joke that not a day goes by without me saying in some meeting, “How can we use Harvey for this? What can Harvey do to streamline this? Make sure everything goes into Harvey so when we want to do something with it tomorrow, we’re able to do it.” And the reality is Harvey has the benefits of addressing the security, privilege, and confidentiality concerns that lawyers deal with as part of their day-to-day business. There are other things for which we can use other tools.
These are incredibly powerful tools, and the more you use them, the more you come to appreciate what they can enhance and what they can replace. The replacing part is the bigger and more complicated question. I like to joke about the two revelations of legal AI. Revelation one, “Holy cow, we’re going to save a ton of time using this thing.” Revelation two, “Wait a minute, a lot of what I do is sell time for a living.” So that’s the bigger question of how to figure out what is our real value-add when it isn’t just hours grinding, and how do you build a model around that that delivers and prices the value while streamlining the rest of it, for everybody’s benefit?
DL: I totally agree with you, by the way, on that point about just it no longer being about hours. Another one of my recent guests, Michael Gerstenzang from Cleary Gottlieb, talked about how back in the day, you might evaluate associates based on stamina: “Oh, this associate is a star. She billed 3,000 hours last year.” But in the future, it’s not going to be about the ability to bill 3,000 hours.
So drilling a little deeper on the litigation point, what is some task that you think Harvey is really good at, and what is some task where you think it’s not there yet?
JIB: One of the things that I try to do is make sure I’m using it myself and not just being the senior partner who has other people interface with the technology, because it’s just not the same. Look, I still jump on Westlaw and look for cases; I still jump on Relativity and look at documents. The minute I can’t get my hands dirty, I’m not really sure what I’m doing. So I do want to think about your question for a minute.
I will tell you, one of the things that I have found Harvey to be good at is coming up with Q&A. For example, say you’re getting ready for an appellate argument. Sometimes you ask your colleagues, “Give me some questions.” If it’s a big argument, you do a moot. You can do all those things. But if I’m up at five o’clock in the morning, working—as I often am, because that’s my quiet time—I don’t have that benefit of colleagues. But I can just put the briefs into Harvey and ask it to give me a series of questions, with the hardest ones first or the easiest ones first, and then go back and forth with it, and ask it to give me more. I find it really useful for that.
There’s a range of things where it’s useful for a quick and dirty response. Just this morning, I was getting ready for a deposition. I realized I didn’t have a working chronology of the case. So I could ask for one and get it two days later, or I could just work with Harvey for 20 minutes and have a “good enough” chronology.
I find that for bigger projects—if you want to put together a draft of a brief, let’s say, which is its own issue, because you’ve really got to watch the cases, the hallucination thing we all worry about and see in the headlines every day, or even a full deposition outline or a draft of an opening—for some things like that, it’s not there yet. But I fully acknowledge that might just be that I’m not there yet, in how I’m operating the tool. A lot of it is knowing what to do iteratively, knowing what to break down, and prompt engineering. As with computers from the beginning, garbage in, garbage out. If you’re asking a question that it doesn’t know how to answer, sometimes you have to ask a better question. But I’m really impressed with the speed at which all of these tools are improving. It used to be that when you would ask a vendor, “Oh, can it do this?”, they would say, “Oh, well, maybe about a year and a half from now.” Now you ask those questions and they’re like, “Yeah, in a couple of weeks, it’ll do that too.” It’s astonishing, and it’s wonderful.
DL: Yes, the speed of innovation is breathtaking. As a user of AI myself, I notice it. And I also agree with you about getting your hands dirty; that’s really important. I would urge any senior lawyers or not-so-senior lawyers who have been hearing about AI but have avoided using it, give it a spin, because you’re going to have to know how to use it, whether you like it or not.
You mentioned something very interesting earlier. You talked about how you think it may have different effects on Biglaw versus boutiques. Can you expand on that?
JIB: Sure. And look, these are generalizations, right? And they’re not in any way firm-specific. This is sort of like cocktail-party shorthand, if you will. But a lot of Biglaw is stereotypically built on leverage and a lot of it, right? When you and I were at Wachtell, it was famously one-to-one, associates to partners, but the highly levered firms were two and a half or three to one. Now there’s much more leverage than that as a matter of course. And what that means is that those eye-popping, multi-billion-dollar revenue years at top firms, a lot of that is being driven by numbers and leverage and associate leverage—non-equity partners is its own issue, but associate leverage. And the first tasks that AI is coming for are the junior-most associate tasks, and it works its way up from there.
So I think clients are going to be reluctant to have a large number of associates on a bill, a large number of associates on a matter: “Why would I pay for that? Why aren’t you using AI for that?” Whereas the boutique model…. and we don’t love the word boutique, so I’ll use it with an asterisk. To some people, “boutique” connotes “a little too small to play in the big leagues.” I think that’s not true—it’s certainly not true of us—but I’ll note the asterisk out of deference to those of my partners who feel that way. The boutique model, it’s not built on a leverage model. It’s built, if anything, on a smaller and a leaner team, which translates into a more partner-heavy team, all else being equal. It’s built on the skills and judgment and strategic thinking that it will take longer for AI to really hit.
And I know that there are forward-thinking lawyers at Biglaw firms who are thinking about the size of their incoming classes and whether the summer classes need to get a little smaller, whether the incoming associate classes need to get a little smaller. And I also know, just through the grapevine, that at some law schools, forward-thinking trustees are saying, “Wait a minute, we’re fundamentally a pipeline to those big firms. If they’re going to cut back, we have to think about this now as well.” Because one is just downstream from the other, and it’s unpredictable. But at a gross level, it’s more of a challenge to the Biglaw model than it is to the boutique model.
DL: I totally agree with you. And part of it may also have to do with billing arrangements. I am guessing that at Glenn Agre, you employ alternative fee arrangements more than you did at Kasowitz or—well, Wachtell may get an asterisk—but I’m guessing you use alternative fee arrangements a fair amount?
JIB: We do. And that was one of the things that was important to us in starting the firm: having more flexibility. And again, it goes back to relationships, because fee arrangements are really about alignment. So we’re more open to that. We’re always happy to talk about it. I mentioned near the beginning that my undergraduate degree was in finance. A lot of the litigation that we do is obviously in and around finance. Every case is just an investment to be financed, and alternative fee arrangements turn on who’s financing it, who’s bearing risk, who’s bearing upside. We’re comfortable working with litigation funders and bringing them to the table as a way to unlock value. We’re always interested in how that sector of our field is evolving, including the uses of insurance instead of financing, which are two sides of the same coin. So it is a big part of what we do. And as AI rolls through the industry and the billable-hour model has to grapple with it, there is a lot of opportunity to think creatively about alternative finance arrangements that work well for everybody.
DL: That’s another field that I would urge people to pay attention to if they’re not already: litigation finance (and not just because Burford Capital is one of my sponsors). And I also agree with you about boutiques… or I don’t know, would you have a preferred term if you don’t like
boutique?
JIB: See, that’s the problem with not liking the term boutique. Look, I do words for a living, and I do words for pleasure. I don’t have another word besides boutique that captures what we’re trying to say. So we’ll stick with boutique, but I appreciate your coming back to me on what would do better. Thank you.
DL: And I would say that any notion that boutiques are limited is definitely getting dispelled. Two of my former guests, Karen Dunn and Jeannie Rhee, founded Dunn Isaacson Rhee, and they’re handling the Google antitrust trial. Now, they have co-counsel, but in terms of the stand-up-in-court stuff, the Dunn Isaacson Rhee lawyers are doing a lot of that. And also going to your point about AI, if you don’t need the so-called bodies to plow through millions of documents because AI can do the document work, well, then why wouldn’t you hire a boutique, and just marry that with AI, an alternative legal services provider that does document work, or any number of other things?
But let’s turn now to my speed round. These are four questions that are the same for all my guests. And my first question is, what do you like the least about the law? And this can either be the practice of law or law as an abstract system.
JIB: So short answer, general responses and objections in discovery. Complete waste of time. Everyone puts them in there just because if they don’t, they’re afraid they’ll get in trouble. They accomplish nothing. They’re barely read. They’re almost never litigated, yet nevertheless, they persist. So we’ll leave bigger issues for a different conversation. I’ll stick with that as my speed-round answer.
DL: I really like that. I like specificity in answers to the speed round, as opposed to generalities, so that’s a really good one.
My second question is, what would you be if you were not a lawyer?
JIB: Does arbitrator or mediator count?
DL: Too close. Give me something else, like… professional surfer.
JIB: Yeah, not that, not that. It would probably still be something involving words in some way. I will confess that some little piece of me wants to go off and do a Ph.D. in Bible and be an academic somewhere. So I’ll go with that because chef is just too far afield and a terrible career choice.
DL: My third question is, how much sleep do you get each night?
JIB: I aim for seven. It’s usually a little under six.
DL: Fair enough. And my last question is, any final words of wisdom, such as career advice or life advice, for my listeners?
JIB: Sure. So I talked about how in one sense I’m doing what I always wanted to do. In another sense, I’m doing something totally different, as a founder. And so my advice would be life is longer, and your career is longer, than you can possibly appreciate. Don’t be afraid to reexamine the future. Don’t be afraid to take a leap.
DL: Well, it was great chatting with you, Jed, and I totally admire what you and your partners have built in taking that leap and starting Glenn Agre. Congratulations on your fifth anniversary, and thanks for joining me!
JIB: Thanks so much, David. It’s great to connect and great to have a chance to talk.
DL: Thanks so much to Jed for joining me, and congratulations to him and his colleagues on the fifth anniversary of Glenn Agre Bergman & Fuentes.
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