Compressed Matt Peers

Matt Peers: I just feel optimistic and positive about what this is doing for people's ability to, to connect with the people they need to connect with, to get the information they need to, to, to get in the right, in the right format, at the right time. And I think that helps to transform the way that people just do their day-to-day work.

Tom Arbuthnot: Welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast this week. We have a really great perspective from Matt Peers. Who's global? COO at Pinsent Masons. He's had a career in various, uh, pro services and legal companies. Uh, some really quite big companies as well, and he gives us a really good perspective on. Modern work teams adoption, and in particular, we talk about Copilot adoption and his experience on the Copilot adoption journey.

Really interesting conversation. Really great insights for Matt. Thanks for his time and also many thanks to Pure IP who are the sponsor of this podcast. Really appreciate their support of Empowering Cloud. On with the show. Hi everybody. Welcome back to the Teams Insider podcast, another great one This week we've got a customer perspective, but we're kind of taking it, uh, up a level a little bit.

Uh, I've got Matt Peers, who is global, COO, uh, Pinsent Masons. And we're gonna talk about, uh, legal and. AI in legal and modern work in legal and, and get a whole perspective on, on that area. So Matt, thanks for joining the show. 

Matt Peers: Thanks Tom. It's good to be here. 

Tom Arbuthnot: So, um, why don't you give us a little bit of background 'cause you, you've been a, a few big organizations in CIO COO type roles.

I'd love to hear a little bit about your journey story. 

Matt Peers: Yeah, thanks for, thanks for asking. So in, in the most recent past I've been in, um, one of the big four. And, um, I, I spent a considerable amount of time there delivering uc platforms, modernizing the, the desktop. I then I. Left there and joined, um, uh, magic Circle Law Firm, and I spent, uh, the first three years of that time again, kind of modernizing the desktop, introducing new ways of working.

Um, I transitioned from a CIO role in, in that organization to become the global COO and, and the global COO bit Really. Just reflects the fact that so many of the projects, programs, and initiatives that everybody's delivering in professional services at the moment require tech and a, and a tech understanding and a leaning and um, and, and so I thoroughly enjoy just driving initiatives.

Projects, programs that make the lives of professionals, uh, better and more interesting. Uh, and then I guess what, what sort of, sort of interesting for me at the tail end of my, of my last role was when the, when the pandemic hit, and at the point that we are recording this now, the pandemic started just right around five years ago.

We all went home and at that point, I think. Lots of professional services firms while they had the ability to use video, do video calls, they were, they were very new to it. It was a technology and a, and a suite of technologies that they found quite difficult to navigate and difficult to understand, and through the pandemic.

Lots of professional services firms, including the, the firm I was working in really thrived. Um, I, I subsequently left and um, and I'm now in this role at PIN at Mason's. Um, PIN at Mason's is about 3,500 people. Um, we're working in think 28 offices. We've got, and we're across all four, four continents. Um, lots of great professionals serving clients, providing them with, with legal.

Advice, um, but some other adjacent professional services as well. So we've got a suite of people who work a combination of in the office at home, at client site. We're, we're kind of always on, so it's a 24 7, 3 6 5 type business. Uh, and, and we are heavily invested in the Microsoft Suite across the board.

So, um, deeply. Integrated Microsoft technologies in what we, what we do day to day. But we also have the, the, the other kind of added complexities that come with the legal world of we have to keep lots of document management and record management systems going and do time recording and all kinds of things like that.

So it's, um, it's, it's been a fascinating and interesting journey, um, delivering change. In this environment. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. It's super interesting actually, the way you started there with like COO and CIO and technology permeating everything. And it feels like that's definitely, um, true. Like we were talking, uh, in the, in the prep call around, you know, uh, finally kind of architecture and, and facilities and, and IT, and rooms and uc.

Coming together, but I guess you are seeing that across, not just uc, but across the wider business conversation. 

Matt Peers: Absolutely. And, and where can, where can tech be used in helping us navigate the careers of our people as well as their experiences day to day in how they feel? And we, we also can't ignore the fact that for, for lots of people.

Having good and easy to use tech is a, is a real hygiene factor. And, and your day is destroyed or ruined because the, the video call you'd been planning couldn't connect the sound properly or you were in a meeting room and you had a disaster when you were trying to impress people. Um, and so tech is like this sort of benchmark.

We've, for things that we've gotta get right. And then on top of the technology, we've gotta be running a series and a suite of apps that people. Know how to use, they know how to navigate and they can get the best and the most out of them. And, and yet some of the challenges that we've got now come from, come from the, the, the kind of the, the, the ongoing investment and evolution of apps at, at a massively fast rate.

And AI has, has utterly transformed and accelerated that like a sort of huge adrenaline shot. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. It's, it's really interesting. AI in, in legal. Proser, like I kind of expected it in proser because project based out there with customers quite fast moving. I didn't see it coming in legal, but actually legal's been one of the strongest verticals and it feels like the legal as a sector.

Has appreciated this is gonna have a massive impact on how we work. So we have to be trying things and in the conversation. Is that fair? 

Matt Peers: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think the, the kind of the, the accelerator it gave legal and I guess legal has prob possibly been unfairly tarnished with this brush of being always a bit behind the times, always a bit of a follower and, and the sort of the, the avalanche that came with with.

AI being incorporated into so many different products and the fact that it lends itself quite well to knowledge workers and people who are, who are going and finding things they've done before, doing bits of research, pulling it together, adding the, the kind of their own current understanding of business and where the world is, and using that to create advice.

The, the AI tools that are coming lend themselves really well to helping augment that journey. And, and we certainly, as a firm, we are really clear on the fact that this is this AI wave that we're seeing at the moment. It's not really about replacing what lawyers do, it's about augmenting the work that we do.

It's about creating a better quality product for our clients. It's about. Enabling people to better communicate, collaborate, work more quickly. And like I, I know I'm sure you feel it as well, but it feels like we live in a world which is, it's, it's all about kind of instant gratification and everything running at a big pace.

And, and, and people want to be able to respond quickly and these tools are letting that happen. And we've certainly seen investment from legal tech service providers, not just, not just in the product sets that they're. Providing and, and the, the kind of the AI modules that come with them, but actually external investment into the legal tech sector has really awoken in the last few years, and people are seeing that there is significant opportunity for, for individuals to, to work differently.

But, but we can't forget in all of this that we still have to. Think really carefully about the regulated environments that that lawyers have to work in and the fact that we've got security challenges and ai, again, it provides a different set of, of challenges and opportunities around, around InfoSec and, um, 

Tom Arbuthnot: yeah, it's such a, it's such a broad, like AI is well, is such a broad term and I feel like it is going incredibly fast and it's really interesting to watch and see the applications.

But it kind of, um, I feel like it's, it's, it's constantly a little bit over marketed, like you said, about the replacing people. Like, like watch it generate a contract versus using it to summarize meetings. And I think a lot of the, it's great from, from a technology point of view, it's great to see the kind of pushing the boundaries of the conversation.

But I feel like sometimes because it's marketed so hard, we forget the relatively easy wins. I say easy wins. We didn't have this. Two, three years ago. But like meeting summaries, recaps, find differences in documents. Like, like things that aren't they, they're using generative technology, but they're not generating content.

And I feel like that's the, the interesting legal conversation. 'cause you say you've had, of all sorts of standards, you have to, for legal compliance and for your customers. But there's a lot of value just in the, what I would call the basics of ai. Things like meeting summary recap. Absolutely. Email summary.

Matt Peers: And when we, when we talked to, we, we were on the Microsoft early adopter program for Copilot, and we, we ran a whole series of, of focused groups of people, each of them with a different use case. So, and, and we're testing these things through. And when you get to the end of all of that, and people have started to use technology for a while, we were asking questions like, if we took Copilot away now, what would you miss?

It's not about always saying, well actually I've got 28 extra minutes in a day. Yeah. But it's just like, you know, what, what real things are you missing? And I think you're right, the, the, the way that the stuff has come on with summarizing meetings, joining things late, which inevitably happens, um, and being able to quickly get a recap on where you are.

We, we are, as a firm, we spend a lot of time. Taking notes of meetings and wanting to make sure that they are properly recorded. Mm-hmm. Um, you know, an accurate reflection of what was said. And being able to do that and have a first draft by the, by the technology, then augmented again by a human. Um, and, and quality check by a human does lead to a better quality output.

And I've, we've recently been. Running a, uh, a series of elections. Firms like to have, um, elected roles and we have a series of elected roles and we've recently been running some elections. And, um, the candidates when addressing colleagues around the firm, and this is on done on an international basis, we did all the recordings of those using, uh, Microsoft Stream.

And you could get, when you go back into the stream, you get to see the person, you get to see questions that were asked of the person. You get to see a transcript of what was said. You can click on any one person and the video will take you to where, where you were in the conversation. And when I just go back to where we were five years ago to sort of where, where talked about with the, where the pandemic came in, it kind of blows my mind how.

Quickly things have changed and moved on, but how much, how much richer the, the content is enabling people to make choices and decisions on, you know, in that case, who they're gonna vote for in an election. But, um, I think it's just creating lots of extra value and it's, it's bringing more color to, to the world.

So 

Tom Arbuthnot: that early access to Copilot and kind of Copilot adoption journey. I talked to lots of organizations and there's definitely a big conversation around. How do we get people to adopt? How do we get on that journey? And some people leaning very much into it and some people finding it harder to make it part of their habit and part of their workflow.

How did you find that kind of a adoption journey? 

Matt Peers: So, uh, like, like I described, we had a series of, we call 'em like communities of practice, that each looked at a different aspect of co-pilots. If some would be focused on meeting summaries, some on document collaboration, there'd be just different aspects of.

Of the Copilot, um, journey people would be focused on. And what, what we found was that it's all about stories. And even today it's still about training, training, training, stories, encouragement. Um, I. Sharing the good news and shining a light on something, it's really easy to have co-pilot and to focus it only on the one activity that, that you want to do.

Like summarize this long chat that I've, that that has erupted while I've been in a meeting or something. Actually having our people tell stories. Short, sharp. Video reminders of to people. And we, we, we are currently at a point where we do not, we've not licensed our whole firm. Um, we've got a sort of throttling point that exists.

However, we've got quite a significant queue for people that wanna come onto Copilot. And what we are doing as we roll it out, it's making sure that those people that have got it are making the best use of it before we, we release that license and then bring somebody else in. Um, and that was done actually as a way of getting.

Adoption to it because it keeps us really focused on how is it being used and where is it being used and, and where is the value as much as it is a, uh, a financial play. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. 'cause it is, um, I think that investment is sometimes underestimated. Obviously there's the license investment, but then there's the effort to make change and it's kind of a, a continuous cycle because new abilities come in, new ways of using it come in.

So it's not a one and done. It's, uh, it's, it's a bit, a bit different to any other adoption cycle I've been through. Like, we are giving you instant messaging, like we are giving you, you know, online conferencing like the, once you've got it, you got it. But AI is the, the, the abilities are evolving, aren't they?

Matt Peers: Absolutely. And, and we, what we're seeing all the time is, of course, Copilot has been added to more and more aspects of the, of the Microsoft Suite. Hmm. And, and you can now do a load more things, for example, in teams with Copilot that you couldn't do a while ago. And we've got to find ways of dripping that into people's, like, busy people's working days.

Yeah. To say, actually you could get value from, from, you know, whatever that, whatever that new thing is. So just keeping on top of where is the functionality and, and also where, where do we want our people to be going with that functionality. Um, one of the things that we've been noticing over a period of time is historically I think a lawyer would log into that.

Laptop in the morning and their default place they would go would've been Outlook and, and everything. They, the, the whole anchor point for the day was in Outlook. Yeah. Calendar was in there. Some notes were in there, contacts were in there and all that kind of thing. I am seeing increasingly people's anchor point.

The first thing they go into is teams. It's the chats they're included in is the teams channels that they're in. They can get that. That's a radical cultural change because that 

Tom Arbuthnot: is. Like literal decades of like, outlook is the center of the universe, and I have this finding system. I work this way because I, I've been through that user adoption journey with various organizations.

Yeah. And it's non, non-trivial. And obviously I guess the pandemic accelerated that culture because we all lived in teams during that period. 

Matt Peers: Yes. It, it certainly helped. And I think the new things that are coming into teams, the fact that you now have your, you have your full calendar in teams and not just the, like what was set, what was set up as teams meetings Yeah.

Is helpful. The ability to do summaries is helpful. I think it's easier to be added to teams, channels. Um, I still find even at a personal level, there's a kind of little bit of notification overload that, that people. Are resisting in teams and it's kind of like, actually I don't, and it's not that, it's not that those things can't be switched off, it's simply a, people dunno how to, and it doesn't always feel easy or someone's added you into a group and then all of a sudden that group's going crazy that day.

Yeah. And you're just trying to get a document out, you know, and, and so, so yeah, the dealing with a new ways of doing things, it's also, I. Is increased is it's increased. I said before about the sort of pace of response and things teams does increase the immediacy of, of when you expect a response. If I send an email, I would expect to get a response and maybe the same, call it same day.

If you send a teams message, you kind of expect to get a response. Like within, yeah, almost by return. Um, and 

Tom Arbuthnot: that's, and that's an interesting cultural shift, isn't it? Because teams, it was instant messaging originally. With Link Skype. Mm-hmm. And that was really, it felt really instant and sort of transient and teams is.

Perpetual. And actually it's interesting that that changes from organization to organization. I think there's almost a hump to get over there that teams is not instant because we've got this channel with this conversation. And if you spend all your time just watching the conversation, you're not gonna get anything done.

Correct. But actually you've got. Direct messages or calling if it's instant. But that's a very, I completely agree. It's a very interesting cultural thing because there is a risk that you just spend all your time just triaging messages and where's the time to do the, the work. Work do the 

Matt Peers: actual work, of course, yeah.

And then, and then people, and then people have working days that they feel are too long. And it, and it starts to become, it starts to become more complicated. But we, we are, we're, we're kind of trying to navigate this with people and, and help people on the journey, but at the same time, I'm just. I just feel optimistic and positive about what this is doing for people's ability to, to connect with the people they need to connect with, to get the information they need to, to, to get in the right, in the right format at the right time.

And I think that is. That, that helps to transform the way that people just do their day-to-day work. Um, yeah, I feel and make 'em actually feel more efficient. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. The, the, the co-pilot and AI conversation has given the teams chat and channels, the shots in the arm, as well as in the sense of, I want all my documents and chat about a project in this place so I can query it if some of it's over here and some of it's over here.

And same thing for teams, phone teams, meetings, like, I think we're, we're not quite there yet, but you can see how close we are now to. Spanning all these different data sets of email, chat channels, meetings, meeting transcripts, phone calls, and bringing all that information together, which we obviously couldn't do if they were all siloed.

Matt Peers: No, completely agree. And um, and, and I've got, we, we, we have got, um, in the legal sector, most larger law firms use a formal document or records management system, um, and. Often that is excluded from search and it's not being integrated fully into the Microsoft ecosystem. Yeah. It doesn't mean you can't access it through it, it's just not, it's just not part and parcel of all the tools and, and, and where that goes.

And we're working at the moment with different vendors in the space to understand how these journeys sit side by side because the, the. Rapid rate of change in the technology and what the technology can do, um, means that we can, from a technology architectural perspective, you can get lost in what's gonna be the right tool for, for, for now, for later.

Um, we've got millions of documents and emails in our document management system. Yeah. Um, but actually the, the power that people are getting from, from ease of search in just through the, through the teams desktop or, or Outlook desktop or whatever. Means that we do need to make more of those things easily accessible.

Um, and I think when you start to look at where like generative AI then goes for, for the types of things that we are looking at doing with the way that we provide services to clients. And it could be anything as simple as how are we pitching our, our credentials and our capabilities to our clients.

Mm-hmm. We need access to lots of things that we've done before in order to get the right, the right answers. So the more data that we can safely and securely get into a place where it can be harvested and presented to these, uh, the, these LLMs and other things, the better for me. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, and it's interesting, as you say, like all those products, those case management document manage products are gonna be bringing their own AI search index capabilities.

Do, do you end up having. Different, different AI interfaces, different use cases. Doing it with Copilot, you know, connecting to that word that, that's obviously what Microsoft wants to see is they want to see Copilot is the center of the universe and it can dip into all of those tools. But there'll definitely be a conversation there about where do I go to, to start that, you know?

AI data insight journey, I guess. 

Matt Peers: Yes, I think you're right. And, and the, because we are so heavily invested in, in Microsoft, and I've got no reason to be praising them over anybody else, but, but the natural place for us to start is through Copilot. It's the interface that people became. Most used to early on on this journey.

Yeah. People are, are learning how to prompt with it more readily. It's quite, quite good. It's that the investment is still coming in that space. So like one would imagine that the path of least resistance uses that, that, that. Channel right now to get to use Copilot to, to say how do we integrate that to everything else?

And we will have to see how other vendors feel about that and how their own products evolve and, and how they then fit in. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. Yeah, I think that's really interesting. It's also interesting, as you said, that the teams is becoming more of the starting interface for a lot of conversations. So actually having your.

AI there is really interesting, and one of the Microsoft things that I've said is some of the biggest adoption is chat summary. Meeting summary, because that's the, it's the content overload, summarization, and that's where a lot of people discover the value of, of AI and Copilot. 

Matt Peers: Mm, yeah. I, I completely agree with that.

And, and it's, it's absolutely where we are seeing, if you were to poll the people in our firm right now, you would hear back that, that those things are the, the, the, the kind of the killer bits of functionality for them today, but they obviously see value in, in various other. Um, parts of it as well.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. So, Matt, people will be listening from all types of organizations size and scale. From what you've learned on that Copilot AI journey so far, what would be kind of some advice you would give to them in terms of either adoption or use cases or value? Uh. Number one, 

Matt Peers: um, you you'd cut. Training is continuous, so you've got to keep training about it.

Number two, success stories and real people telling real stories about what happened is the most powerful way to get people to engage. Number three, finding those people in your organizations who are. Really up for the change and really want to see the technology work. You, you, we often talk, when we're doing any project deliverable, the, the, you know, let's get proper champions on board, but more so than ever in this space and people who can, can kind of cut through the fact that this isn't just about.

This isn't just about tech doing some with some new feature. This is actually about different ways of working. It's kind of takes it, it takes it up a level for me. Yeah. Um, I, I think the other thing is that like you have to be, you do have to be quite patient with, with where the stuff is going. It's not perfect out the box and some of the things that you may want it to do, it can't do today.

I still think in, when you look at. The co-pilot ability to do certain tasks in Excel, for example, it like Excel. It flashes up to say, you know, do you wanna use Copilot in Excel? I think, yes, I would like it to just do these things for me and then it can't do it. Mm-hmm. And then you kind of go and it's like, how long do I spend trying to make co-pilot help me?

Versus just get on and do it a different way. And so like, you know, you've gotta be patient with it. It is, it is an area that is getting. Significant investment and the functionality is moving at, at quite a pace and something that might not be there this week may well be in, in, in a future release very soon.

And so that, and I guess that's a, that's quite a big shift from what we've been used to. In the space before, you used to only ever get kind of significant functionality changes. If you go back through the, um, when you went from kind of Skype to link to Skype for Business for all the different things, that'd 

Tom Arbuthnot: be some kind of, there'd be some kind of year version number or some kind of big project to be like, we're jumping from X to Y.

Whereas now it's you say more, more continuous. And in some ways that's hard to communicate to end users, as you said, who are very busy. Mm-hmm. Like how do you get through to them that. This is significant or when it is significant, uh, that, that continuous cycle of learning 

Matt Peers: and it's the keeping your, we, we are quite big promoters of, uh, Veeva Engage, we use as our micro blogging thing internally.

Um, and I. What we find with it is that the, the engagement around AI as a topic on Veeva Engage for us as a firm is, is I think higher than, than on any other channel. Okay. That's interesting. And people have subscribed to it and we've recently, our director of knowledge has just been running a series of like really short, sharp refreshers for people on ai.

It's had more subscribers and. Active engagement as a topic than anything I've ever seen on there in, in my time at the firm. 

Tom Arbuthnot: No. That shows the genuine interest, doesn't it? 'cause he's self-selecting. I will spend some time checking this out. Absolutely. 

Matt Peers: Yeah. And so, so I think yeah. Get, get people and, and you know, our, our director of knowledge is, he sort of picks this up on his own.

He knows that there's a load of value that people can get out of this and he just wants to promote it. So he's like, well, I will run this thing through this, through this channel. It's, it's an, it's a sort of, it's an adjunct to his day job. Yeah. But, but he is going down really well. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Amazing. Well, Matt, thanks for sharing the journey.

Really interesting insights for everybody on, uh, on that kind of adoption curve. And, uh, maybe we, uh, we give it a bit of time and, uh, we can jump on again and talk about where it is in, uh, six months or 12 months or something. Great. Thanks. Awesome. Cheers, Matt. 

Matt Peers: Bye.