Sarah Cottrell: Hi, and welcome to the Former Lawyer Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Cottrell. I've practiced law for 10 years and now I help unhappy lawyers ditch their soul-sucking jobs. On this show, I share advice and strategies for aspiring former lawyers and interviews with former lawyers who have left the law behind to find careers and lives that they love. Hi, Ben. Welcome back to the Former Lawyer Podcast.

Ben Chiriboga: Hi, Sarah. It's good to be back.

Sarah Cottrell: For everyone listening, if you listen regularly, you may have heard Ben's first episode, which was released last year. Ben, do you want to introduce yourself briefly and then I'll talk a little bit about why you're back.

Ben Chiriboga: OK. First of all, thanks for having me back. I'm really excited to speak about what we're going to talk about today. For those who don't know me, my name is Ben Chiriboga. Today, I'm the founder of Reframe Lawyer, which is a platform that helps lawyers move into legal technology and AI careers. And that's really what we're going to talk about. If you… a little bit of background on that, why am I even thinking about that? Maybe like many people, I practiced for a little while until my 30s. I sort of hit a roadblock and I said, this isn't really for me, this whole lawyer thing isn't for me. It just so happened that like a lightning bolt, I kind of got hit with the legal technology bug. And I just remember thinking like, wow, I'm like the only person that was like totally floored with this technology. It was like e-discovery software. I won't go through my entire story, but basically I was just completely floored. And I was like, wow, if I'm not going to be a lawyer, it seems like maybe I might be able to move into legal technology. So that's what I did for my whole 30s. I became a founding team member of a startup. Nexel scaled that to, you know, the typical sort of like tech journey, many millions in valuation, raised a bunch of money, all of that kind of stuff. I hit 40 and I've sort of stepped back from Nexel. I'm still in an advisory role there, but now I'm doing Reframe because of the amount of people that have come to me and asked me, how do I get a career in legal technology and AI? I just really think that there's something to do there. And it's work that's very near to my heart. And it's also a business that I think is really good as kind of like the legal industry transforms and legal technology gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

Sarah Cottrell: So I asked Ben to come back on the podcast because, first of all, legal tech comes up all the time as a career that lawyers who I work with are thinking about. And part of it is just like, you know, it's legal adjacent, right? And so for a lot of lawyers, when they're thinking about no longer practicing, they're sort of this sense of like, well, maybe I can do something that's like not practicing, but like in the ballpark, there are some things that come up around that, right? So a lot of people who became lawyers were like political science majors in undergrad, or international studies, like I was, or English, or whatever and don't have a significant tech background, or in some cases really any tech background. And so often what I run into with clients, who are considering legal tech or maybe even just have had a sort of general interest in tech, but ended up becoming a lawyer instead, they have this sense of like, okay, well, I kind of think I might be interested in this, but I have no idea how to get there. Is it even open to me, because of my background? How would I articulate the skills that I have to even make a move like that? What other skills do I need to acquire, in order to position myself for that? And then, of course, the thing that I have seen a ton of, even just in the last… The podcast will be seven years old in August, which is wild, wild.

Ben Chiriboga: Wow, that is wild.

Sarah Cottrell: But anyway, in seven years, like legal tech has been sort of like booming all along to various degrees. But one of the things that clients who are interested in going into legal tech run into, and we've talked about this on the podcast and with other people, who moved into legal tech, is that there's like, there are no agreed terms.

Ben Chiriboga: That’s right.

Sarah Cottrell: There are no agreed roles. Like it's not like you can say, I want to do X and then go look for that one kind of role across like all law firms or all legal tech companies, because there's so much variation. And I think it's shifted a lot, even in the last two to three years…

Ben Chiriboga: Totally.

Sarah Cottrell: … in terms of like how people think about it and also with the rise of AI. Anyway, all of that is why I asked Ben to come on the podcast, because I know there are lots of people listening, who at least have this idea of like, maybe legal tech might be one of the things that I want to explore. But a lot of people just stop themselves from thinking about it, because they're like, I just wouldn't even know where to start. So where would you like to start with that, Ben?

Ben Chiriboga: Oh my goodness. So the first is, I'll break the fourth wall here and I say you're not alone. So, you know, one, it's my personal story to basically say that, like you, whenever I was getting into legal tech, I just knew… By the way, I don't have a tech background. I was a bio and art history major, double major and whenever I was thinking about legal tech, all I had had was some exposure to using some e-discovery, because I was a litigation associate and I had done some pretty significant discovery during that period of time. I remember the one specific case almost like killed me and it just so happens that like obviously it was the whole like cliche of folders and binders and all the rest of it in rooms and it was just like, I mean, it's like you couldn't even write this stuff. And then we got some technology that happened to do like, what I wasn't able to do in like six months did in like six hours and I was completely floored. Anyway, this is all to say that if this is you and sort of this framing that Sarah sort of laid out, you know, I was exactly the same way. I had the privilege of being 30 and pretty unencumbered and I was able to move to New York City. And this is in 2016 and very quickly, all I was was just surrounded by a bunch of people, who were also trying to figure out. And this is just to say that when you're surrounded by a bunch of other people, who are highly motivated and you're in direct day-to-day proximity with them, this whole question starts to get a little bit easier just because you're getting this flow of information. So the first is just to say like if you're confused, everybody's confused. Everybody doesn't understand like what's going on. Today the noise is 10x what it was back then. And the roles are 10x what they are back then. Which is why this is like a really good time to sort of be thinking about this as a career track. Fast forward 10 years, the roles are so much bigger, the industry is so much larger, so much well funded, so much bigger and so much more viable today. But that, of course, comes with a lot of noise. And Reframe is sort of here to be a bridge between practice into legal tech. And we sort of do that to kind of help this question, which is what's the first step? We sort of are there to kind of bridge this first step into your career.

Sarah Cottrell: I just want to say and I know we both already touched on this, but like, especially if you're listening and you're someone who's thinking about trying to move into a tech type legal tech role, within a law firm, if you're a lawyer and you work at a law firm, like, you know what law firms are like, right? You know how they are about tech, right? Like you… So, here's the thing. I think a part of your work, if you're someone who's thinking about moving into legal tech, especially if you're wanting to do it, in the context of a law firm, is you have to know how to look for what law firms might be looking for and also how to understand what they're actually saying. Anyway, that's something that I have found myself working with clients on, who are thinking about going into legal tech fairly frequently. Because of the fact that the person writing the job posting for a legal tech type job within a law firm might not actually be the person who knows what is going to be going into the role and also is typically writing not tech-type job descriptions. So anyway, I just wanted to flag that for people and I'm sure that you will talk about that some, Ben, as you're talking about the different types of roles. So, take it away.

Ben Chiriboga: Yes. Okay, okay. But yes, 100% to earmark this, you know. And this is just to say, whenever it comes to roles, this is so open, okay? I know that most of us have come from, we know what associate is, we know what a senior associate is, we know what a partner is, we know what a senior partner is, we know what an equity partner is, we know what a non-equity partner is. Okay, that's fantastic. And at the same time, you have to understand that legal tech and AI is sort of creating all of these new roles. You know, I started Reframe right now, because of this promise that for many of us, if you're listening and this doesn't feel, you know, the partnership track doesn't feel like something for you, or it might not be there. That's a whole other discussion, but we'll park that for a second. But this is an opportunity to really see your career as sort of an exploration and sort of like a journey into these new roles, because it's so open. Let's talk about some of the roles here and I'm going to overgeneralize, but I think that this is directionally correct, because I have tested this with the market in various forms and fashions. But first, let's assume that you want to stay practicing, but if you want to stay practicing as a lawyer, you really sort of want to get into this tech enabled kind of legal practice. Now, what's basically the path here is to become something like an AI native lawyer, somebody who effectively just has artificial intelligence as their first, as their operating system, how they practice law. Effectively think about it like you use AI as you would an associate or a senior associate, but you go much, much further. I'm not going to talk about this role so much, but this is just to say that this is a very, very specific career and viable career for lawyers who actually want to stay in practice today. But it has artificial intelligence and AI really in the middle of it. There's a very famous, very viral article that went crazy on Twitter, something like seven million views or something on Twitter. And it was called “The AI Native Lawyer” or “The Claude Native Lawyer”. It was written by a practicing lawyer named Zach Shapiro, who runs a small boutique practice to people, who basically just showed you that he was able to do what a boutique practice of 10, 12 lawyers was able to do. And he sort of explained how he does this with all it in AI. So I'm just going to let that be, because that's fundamentally practicing a completely different way. And for some lawyers who really want to just get out of big law and go and do their own thing, but don't know about hiring associates and managing people and da da da da da da da. You know, I'm just going to say that if you are pretty technical and you have this really high agency toward sort of practicing and doing this, this path is sort of starting to really create itself. So I'll just start with you're still in practice, but basically you run AI as the operating system of your practice. Let's go into legal tech specifically and let's say you leave practice and actually want to go into a legal tech or an AI career. Today there are basically three real paths for you. So the first is product. What does product mean? You might have seen things like legal quants or legal engineers or legal product managers. These are roles where effectively you are creating the workflows and creating what the actual products look like. You could be actually designing products. Now, this is a big bridge to jump in terms of what you're doing, on a practice, on a day-to-day basis, but effectively think about it as Software products, all software products have to basically be designed. The buttons, the workflows, where things go, what happens after you click certain screens, what's being built, what's not being built. These are all roles that lawyers have very, very, very deep access to, because software is simply trying to operationalize and automate certain portions of your workflows. And it is so much easier for a lawyer to do this than somebody who is outside the legal industry. You don't have to be a coder. You don't have to be a developer. You have to design what the products kind of look like, what the series of steps that a user would sort of take. So the first is product. This path is so open today to lawyers, who are somewhat technical, as well as deep practice experience. And that's really available as a very specific path. The next is go-to-market. What do I mean by go-to-market? go-to-market is a word that encompasses business development, sales, as well as marketing today. Today, in legal technology and AI companies, these companies are looking for people, who have industry experience, to sit into go-to-market roles and to be very straightforward, sell technology products into law firms, based on the fact that they have high credibility in the context of sales conversations. These roles are very well paid. Harvey is paying $400,000 plus equity signing for you to go and really sit and sell Harvey. Your superpower if you're somebody like this is you are fantastic at relationships and you will know it if you are, because you're probably pretty commercial in the context of your practice on a day-to-day basis. So that's go-to-market. The last is really an operations role. And legal operations has been part, of sort of the legal adjacent career path for a pretty long time now. For a very long time, it was limited to the Microsofts and the Amazons of the world, which were basically just trying to get more squeeze out of their in-house teams. All I would say is that operations roles are now booming within legal technology companies as these companies themselves are getting so big that they're managing different people. And they're also booming within the context of in-house and law firms as well as, as, and this is very important, as they try to manage change management to basically really operationalize how they actually do their legal work. Really moving from bespoke individual lawyers doing things to sort of more like a system of doing things. And I know that's very high level, but hopefully the framing of all of this is that there's really three main archetypes that you can sit within, an operations, a go-to-market, and a product role. And it's really kind of a function of who you are as a person, and what you are really attracted to and sort of curious about. But these are really the big, big categories. Within that, there's tons of roles. Everybody talks about it differently, but these, I would say, are the three major groupings.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, and I think one of the things that is interesting to know about, a lot of these roles, is like some of the roles might be JD required. A lot of them can be JD preferred, depending on the type of work it is. But if you're a lawyer and you're like listening to Ben talk about these different types of roles and you're like, well, but I don't have any sales experience, or like I don't have any operations experience, or like I've never designed a product. Especially if you're someone who is customer-facing in a legal tech company. Okay, so people who are listening, you know what lawyers are like, right? You know how they are. If someone is talking to them about a product, who's not a lawyer and someone who's talking to them about a product or trying to help them implement a product or whatever, who is a lawyer, there is a difference there…

Ben Chiriboga: Right, exactly.

Sarah Cottrell: … and the fact that someone is a lawyer and has that experience does go a long way with the type of clients that are typically investing in legal tech, in a way that isn't necessarily like, oh, you have this lawyer skill or that lawyer skill. Some of it's just like, oh, I, in-house counsel, or whoever who's a lawyer, feel like you, person with Legal Tech Company, understand the kinds of obligations that I, as a lawyer, am under, in terms of malpractice and blah, blah, blah, and all of these things. So, yeah, I'm curious, Ben. Do you have anything you'd like to say about that?

Ben Chiriboga: Of course. Okay. Let me just, Sarah, I mean, that's basically the whole TLDR takeaway of all of this, but let me just say it in very, very, very specific, very concrete terms. Whenever it comes to applying for these roles, lawyers and the fact that they A) come with industry experience and B) they come with a network, automatically shooting up to basically the top 1% of most candidates, based on the fact that all things being equal. It's so much easier for a lawyer to learn, if they are commercially minded, to learn sales skills that then they come with sales skills, plus the legal experience, than a person who has been selling, I don't know, at Amazon and they've been dealing with, you know, direct to consumer companies for them to try to understand legal. It simply is so much easier. And take it from somebody who has run a legal technology company, who has hired many, many, many people. At the end of the day, the onboarding and the upside is so much simpler for people who have deep industry experience. You need to have the skills. I'm telling you right now, you just need to have the skills, but skills can be learned. Experience has to be earned, right? Basically. And that's just, that's your competitive advantage right now. And I just want to say it's not a little competitive advantage. It's a large competitive advantage.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. Cosine.

Ben Chiriboga: Yes, Cosine.

Sarah Cottrell: This has been my observation as well. But I want to talk a little bit more about each of the roles that you mentioned, just because for people who are listening. I think that there are just a couple of points that might be interesting to amplify. So the product is the first one that you mentioned. You know, I don't know if you have ever worked with a product that was created for lawyers by developers, who are not lawyers.

Ben Chiriboga: Yes, right, right.

Sarah Cottrell: Which to be clear, I cannot code. It is not like, oh, you're a software developer. You're not as smart as me, a Former Lawyer. It's not that. It's just like, the way you think about what you should be creating as a software developer and the way you think about what you need in a product as a lawyer are two vastly different things.

Ben Chiriboga: Yes, right.

Sarah Cottrell: Vastly different, right? And so I just wanted to talk a little bit about what you mentioned, which is like you can be in a product role and not, I mean, you do have to like upscale on some like you know, tech side things. But like, you do not have to be a software developer to be in a product role, right?

Ben Chiriboga: No, no.

Sarah Cottrell: That's actually two different things.

Ben Chiriboga: A hundred percent.

Sarah Cottrell: You have people who are designing the product, and then you have the people who are actually coding.

Ben Chiriboga: Yes.

Sarah Cottrell: And those are two groups of people, right?

Ben Chiriboga: Yes, absolutely.

Sarah Cottrell: And so, and trust me, as someone who has used a product that was designed for lawyers without lawyer involvement, it is confounding in the extreme. You really do need to have lawyers involved in the creation of these products, because they understand what concerns will be foremost or even what legal department or law firm might need. And then even within the product, I am curious, Ben, if your experience has, there's both the actual design, product design…

Ben Chiriboga: Yes.

Sarah Cottrell: … but then there's also the, like, implementation…

Ben Chiriboga: A hundred percent.

Sarah Cottrell: … like customer implementation. And there's also kind of like a middle-ish ground where, like, you're not actually the person doing the sales, but you're the person who's, like, producing the information. So that someone who's doing sales can answer questions that clients have about, like, you know, very complex, like, enterprise-level questions.

Ben Chiriboga: Yes.

Sarah Cottrell: So there are, like, different facets of product. I don't know if you would consider all of those roles within product or some of them you consider in the other two you mentioned, but I just wanted to talk about those briefly.

Ben Chiriboga: I love it. I love it. Okay, so let's start with just the developer point to really nail the nail. Super hit.

Sarah Cottrell: You love you software developers.

Ben Chirboga: Yes, we love you software developers. They do not care. They do not care what they are building. Software developers are basically interested in one thing. A) they are interested in code and development practices, and that is all about how efficient they can write code. And the second is they care about the code base and the back end and the front end and how these two things. If they're developing things for lawyers, if they're developing things for farmers, if they're developing things for Martians, it's all the same to them. It's just a matter of what that code base and how that code base is working. The very idea of product development is basically to satisfy the fact that there has to be a mediator between the end user and the developers that are basically developing the product. So that's just to say that is a huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, role that basically for legal technology companies. And I'm going to make this even more crystal clear, this is a huge role for legal technology companies. Why? Legal technology companies are businesses. Those businesses run on two main drivers. The first is revenue. And the second is retention. The first is that they have to be able to sell software at a premium to basically make their margins. Most technology companies raise venture capital. That basically means that they have to sell a lot of it, to basically make the return for the venture capitals that are under backing them. And the way that they do that, of course, is to create products that are very, very, very, very attractive, very, very powerful. So that's the first. The second is retention. Retention is basically and this gets to your implementation. Retention is they have to show that their products are being used year over year, month over month, day over day. And the number one goal is to increase that retention over time, because as you increase that retention, as you increase that engagement, you basically increase your valuation, because you're showing that people are getting more and more and more value. Okay, those are just terms to basically say that developers don't think about any of this. The whole goal is for product people to basically think about how they can design very attractive products that can be sold. And the second is how they can build those products to increase engagement. So that's why these roles are so, so critical to the end business. It's one thing to build a product, it's quite another to sell it and be able to implement it and for it to work and actually drive your bottom line. So that's why product development is so important. We can get into the nuances, but you basically did such a good job, which basically is within all of this, there are people who implement things. There are people who design products. There are people who design products in the context of a sales conversation or a very long sales. And remember, these are million dollar deals that people are designing. So yes, they're putting on. They're putting on very, very elaborate demos. They're putting on very elaborate sales, sort of workflows that are geared specifically for these organizations, because the values and the contract values are very big. So within this, yes, there are product people who are like very deep in the product and there are people who are very, almost product, but sales kind of like oriented and everywhere between. And this is why I wanted to talk about this conversation. It's like, Who are you? This is such a question for you. Who are you? Because these roles, they're going to get even more differentiated as this industry gets even bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And by the way, not only just in legal tech, within law firms as well as in-house teams as well. That's the long term trend here, that products, in-house products are also going to need these people. I know that that's a little crazy to think about, but this is where it's going, as the cost of developing products itself is going down and down and down. And law firms and in-house teams are thinking this build versus buy is now very, very real. Anyway.

Sarah Cottrell: Okay, so I want to circle back to something that you just said and I think it's such an important point and it is one that lawyers often miss, because of the fact that we are so geared toward wanting to execute that sometimes we try to execute before we actually know what our objective is.

Ben Chiriboga: A hundred percent.

Sarah Cottrell: And what I'm saying, what I mean, you're laughing, because I know it's true. Like, who are you? And by that, I assume, although you can clarify, Ben, by that, I assume you mean in part, like, if someone comes to me and says, Sarah, I'm interested in legal tech. I'm like, great. Love that for you. What kind of legal tech are you interested in? What kind of work are you interested in doing?

Ben Chiriboga: Exactly.

Sarah Cottrell: Some people know. A lot of people are just like, I don't know. I just know that there are a lot of jobs and it's legal adjacent. Which again, is a fine place to be, but it is very difficult, it is very difficult to actually apply for and target jobs, especially in a field, where you're going to need to frame your credentials and experience in a certain way, if you don't know who you are, the specific strengths that you bring to the table and what type of role you want to be going for. Because applying for a product design role and applying for some sort of operations role are two very different things.

Ben Chiriboga: Yes, a hundred percent.

Sarah Cottrell: And I think that often and I'm curious, because I know you, Ben, said that you have a lot of people who contact you wanting to go into legal tech. I think a lot of people sort of think, oh, I can decide I want to go into legal tech and then somehow the right job will like... I don't know, jump off the LinkedIn scroll and grab me, kind of. Which, to be totally clear, is exactly what I did, not with respect to legal tech, but just when I was wanting to get out of law, I'd just be scrolling the job boards and hoping that something would magically come up to me and tell me this is what I'm supposed to be doing. This is part of why the way that I work with people and the structure of what I have them go through is, who are you? What are your values? What is your personality? What are your strengths, skills, et cetera? What do you like? What do you not like? All of these other things. And then how do we identify the specific types of roles that are going to be a good fit for you? Because if I'm working with someone and they're thinking about going into legal tech, what I do not want them to do, is to hit the point where they think they're supposed to be applying for jobs and all they know is like, I want a legal tech job, because that is not going to set them up for success.

Ben Chiriboga: You know, basically, Sarah, where your work stops, you know, Reframe sort of starts. I cannot underscore how important it is to understand, at this crucial junction, just for yourself, just, just, just, not only just your time, but just to give yourself this opportunity, to really sort of think about who are you and what do you really want and really where do you want to develop your career. Let's make it concrete for myself, you know and take me as an example. So I stopped practicing at 30 and I moved into legal tech. You know, for two years, I struggled and I did exactly what you were saying, Sarah. I was just kind of all over the place and I never did sort of any of the work to really sort of figure out well, where does my skills, where does my talent, where does my sort of sense of direction, where is all of this necessarily leading me? I was just kind of all over the place, just trying to get into legal tech. And you know what it got me? Nothing. For two years, basically, for two years, I just ran into walls and drained my savings down to $2,000. I was down to my last, my last, my last rent payment in my apartment.

Sarah Cottrell: Down to the wire.

Ben Chiriboga: Down to the wire. And I get this call and, you know, the rest is kind of like history. But basically that's what I did. I just blew a bunch of money. Hey, you know, I love being in New York. That's a whole lot of fun. But that's really where it was, because it led me down ditches and I really didn't have a coherent story. And even whenever I got callbacks and sort of like job interviews, I was kind of all over the place, in terms of how I was describing. Not only did I waste two years not upscaling myself in the right things. I took product management roles. I took operations roles. I did an executive MBA at Harvard. All great, you know, whatever. But eventually, at the end of the day, you know, I ended up getting into a versus sales role, then a marketing role, then eventually a growth role. And then once I was on the path, it was like a straight shot into basically management and executive and leadership and all of that, because I basically found my path. And that accelerated so quickly, once I was able to put myself where I needed to go. That's the hard work that I did. Don't be like me and waste two years and $58,000 on a bunch of other stuff just chasing around. You know, but I'm a little hardheaded and I had, you know, I didn't have no wife, no kids, no mortgage, no anything. So I was able to sort of crawl around the darkness for a while, had a lot of fun, and spent a lot of money doing it. But, you know, there is a better way, you know, effectively. And we can talk about what that sort of like means. But, you know, Sarah, that's why the work that you're doing is so critical, effectively.

Sarah Cottrell: I think that people worry about limiting themselves. So they're working as a lawyer. They're not happy. They have an interest in tech. So they're like, oh, legal tech. But they don't feel like they have what they see as a clear set of skills that means like, oh, I should go for this one type of role.

Ben Chiriboga: Exactly, right.

Sarah Cottrell: And so they try to go for like every legal tech type of role and that is a recipe for madness.

Ben Chiriboga: Take it from me.

Sarah Cottrell: And the reason is that you have the sense of like, I want to get out, I don't want to be practicing law. If I target all the legal tech type roles, then that increases my chances. I don't actually think that's true. I think that what to do is get clarity about who you are, what your strengths are, what you're going to enjoy, so that you know the types of legal tech roles that you want to target. Because ultimately, you're going to have much more success being more targeted in both your presentation of yourself and the types of things you're applying to, then you will if you're just like casting the super wide net. I think it feels like if you cast a super wide net, it's going to be helpful, but actually it just means your presentation of yourself as a potential candidate is just much flatter, right?

Ben Chiriboga: Yes, totally. Just take it from me as a person on the other side now hiring. I'm just telling you, breaking the fourth wall, I will see right through what you're trying to do. You will not have a coherent story,in terms of what you're trying to accomplish and you simply just won't be able to speak the lingo. What you'll fall back on is, oh, I have a lot of legal experience, but I'm sorry, there's going to be a lot of other people, who also have legal experience. What's going to differentiate you, in this capacity, is going to be something that goes like this. I really understand what it means to be in a product role at a legal tech company. These are the problems that legal tech is looking to solve with product management. Here's where I think legal product management is the edge in your company. And oh, by the way, I have all of this experience, in terms of legal experience and I've thought about X, Y, and Z. And if you're really good, you're going to say and also, by the way, you're designing a legal tech M&A product and I was an M&A lawyer, and this is how it all fits together. Just think about how much more compelling that is, rather than just kind of applying for everything. Hopefully that sort of is very sort of black and white. I'm going to be able to, as somebody who's going to be hiring you and interviewing you, I'm just going to be so much more wowed by the latter, not the former.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes, it's sort of like, if I were to have a podcast instead of calling it the Former Lawyer podcast, I just called it like lawyers talking podcast, okay. It's still accurate, in a sense, but like, it's not something that's going to make the people who actually want to be listening to the conversations that are happening on this podcast, listen to the podcast.

Ben Chiriboga: Exactly.

Sarah Cottrell: So that's basically what you're trying to do with yourself in positioning yourself for a legal tech role. So, okay, what else, Ben, what else do people need to know if they are interested in moving into tech?

Ben Chiriboga: You know you want to get into legal tech and you might have this inclination. You might think about product. You might think about go-to-market. You might think about operations. We just kind of lay it out for you. And then from there we say, okay, these are the skills that you need and then this is how to basically position your experience. I think the next thing that people get hung up on is this idea of how to translate my experience and specifically, I'm sorry, but I've just been practicing M&A buyouts for real estate investors in the northeast part of the United States, for the last 10 years. But I think I want to do go-to-market. How do I show that? How do I actually show that I'm able to actually do this role? And here what you really have to start to do is you have to really think about what these roles are trying to accomplish and take your legal experience and sort of say something to the effect of, okay, within the context of my practice, you know, really, I have been, I've been working in my client development toward X, Y and Z, I have put in some process, X, Y and Z that that I've done. Okay, so that's just reframing what you've done less about, nobody cares that you're an M&A lawyer and you have 15 years and you know, X, Y and Z substantive law, what they're really looking for is, okay, you want to go-to-market role, tell me about how you've created a system, for your M&A clients over the course of X, Y, and Z and what sort of go-to-market structure. Okay, so that's one. So that's just reframing and that's kind of like the work that you need to do to sort of bridge that, so that it makes sense to people who are hiring. Let's assume you've never done that, but you still think you want to go into a go-to-market role. How could you start to basically say, create these artifacts, create these proofs, where you're really sort of saying, here's how I think about… This is how I think about go-to-market today. And this is how, you know, X, Y and Z could sort of happen in the context of go-to- market today for a legal technology company. Here are the issues. These are like some of the roadblocks. And this is how I'm thinking about it. Basically, the idea is the following. You need to speak to the role, speak to the role, either based on your experience, or you need to speak about the role in terms of what's going on with that role today. And you need to get really, really deep, in terms of what are the issues for these roles. And I think somebody who's done this absolutely incredible is somebody like Alex Su. So Alex is a friend. You probably know him from TikTok. You know, he's done all of this.

Sarah Cottrell: He was also on the podcast.

Ben Chiriboga: He was also on the podcast. Think of what Alex has done. Of course, Alex got sort of famous during COVID for sort of like, hey, the struggles of being a practicing attorney. And it's great because that's what he is. But Alex is also a fantastic mind, whenever it comes to the role of legal tech sales today. And he's forayed that into a CRO executive role at a legal technology, legal recruiting company, effectively. So this is what, this is all I'm basically saying. These roles, you have to dive yourself into these roles, in terms of like, how are these roles evolving right now and really throwing that. In my case, I got into legal marketing and growth and legal tech growth wasn't even a thing. I kind of like invented it by basically pulling in examples of what growth roles were doing in the broader tech ecosystem and applying it to legal tech and how, boom, you know, all of a sudden I'm this expert in legal tech growth, you know, effectively, because I'm just pulling all of these things. So that's how you start to say, okay, I get it. I get it for everybody on this. I know that you haven't had a sales role before and so you have no quote unquote experience. Nothing is stopping you from diving into these roles and being part of the conversation. Go on to LinkedIn today and people are talking about legal tech sales, or legal tech marketing, or legal tech growth, or legal tech operations, or legal tech product engineering. There are literally thousands of conversations that you can jump into. And that's how you can sort of get into this and sort of show that you're thinking about this role that stands out immensely.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, and if you're listening to this and thinking like, oh my gosh, Sarah and Ben, you're telling me that every role, whether it's legal tech or whatever, I need to be this sort of invested in framing myself for it, that's super overwhelming. And my answer to you is, that is super overwhelming, my friend, which is why…

Ben Chiriboga: Right, right.

Sarah Cottrell: Which is why the Former Lawyer Framework exists and why what I do with my clients is help them get to the point, where they actually know what they want to target, so they're not having to… they're not trying to do, you can't do a deep dive and like reinvention in like 27 different job categories, right? Like, I mean, you can maybe over time.

Ben Chiriboga: Exactly, exactly, exactly. But just think about what Sarah and I have just sort of said. You can't do all of this in operations and product and sales. And I want to be an AI lawyer. And I'm not sure…. you're not going to be able to do it. OK. And it's also, as the hiring person, I'm going to be able to see through that very, very quickly in terms of what you're trying to do. However, you're going to be very super impressive. If you really sort of do the work and you sort of go deep, all of a sudden, all of a sudden you're like, wow, I have a bunch of people, who are just applying out of nowhere. And I have this one candidate who's done just a little bit of work and sort of focus. Wow. They're very, very, very impressive. So I just didn't want to glean over that again. A little bit of work goes a whole hell of a long way.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, yeah. And I think this is why I talk about, for example, why the first thing you should do is not revise your resume. It's why for me and the framework that my clients follow, that's like the very last thing that they're doing.

Ben Chiriboga: Totally, totally.

Sarah Cottrell: And like, actually, if people are curious, I do have like two videos on the Former Lawyer YouTube channel, where I like, it's not a tech job. I think it's like a nonprofit job, but I like walk through a job listing on LinkedIn and talk about how you would target a resume for that specific job. And that kind of process is basically what we're talking about here. It's just not in the tech realm. And the most important piece of that is that you should not be revising your resume, until you know what you're targeting, because it will be so frustrating.

Ben Chiriboga: Yes.

Sarah Cottrell: You will feel like, I don't know what I'm doing. It will exacerbate this sense that you don't have transferable skills, which you do. And yeah, I just, I think it is so important for people to understand, if someone wants to make a move, what they need to do first is figure out who they are and what will be a good fit for them. Because it makes all the rest like a thousand times easier.

Ben Chiriboga: Yes, a hundred percent. A hundred percent. In the master class, reviewing your resume is literally the last thing. The last thing that I advise.

Sarah Cottrell: See? We're on the same wavelength.

Ben Chiriboga: At the end of the week, at the end of the four weeks, the very last thing, the very last thing I say is, update your resume. That's, I basically tell you to network and create a small brand for yourself, a small interest and then only then do you go to the resume. That's the last thing, not the first thing. I know it's backwards, people, but please, you know, just, we gotta reframe a little bit what we're talking about here, okay?

Sarah Cottrell: Well, and I think, you know, we recognize, as people who have worked as lawyers, we recognize that like part of it is this feeling of like doing something, right?

Ben Chiriboga: Yes.

Sarah Cottrell: You can feel like you're doing something when you revised a resume in a way that it doesn't necessarily feel that same way, if you're like networking, or like reflecting on the results of an assessment, or like things that actually are going to ultimately pay more dividends down the road, but don't feel as like check the boxy. Like I have done this specific action, there still are actions that you should be taking, just not… Revising your resume early on is not one of them.

Ben Chiriboga: A hundred percent, totally.

Sarah Cottrell: Is there anything else you'd like to share with the lovely listeners, before we hang up today?

Ben Chiriboga: If I could summarize everything, I know that we talked about roles, we talked about experience and how your experience goes a really long way. I know we talked a lot about how to cross that last mile, in terms of the resume and showing proof and all of that. Here's what I just want… If you don't pay attention to anything else, let me just share this with you. You moving into legal tech and AI is a totally viable career today that is going to really, really be a new career trajectory path for you if you don't see yourself as a practicing attorney. I have been in this industry for 10 years. It has only gone from bigger to bigger, to bigger, to bigger, to bigger, to bigger. Insiders basically think that this is the beginning of a much, much, much, much larger wave. And so if you are an ambitious person who wants to move, you know, this is the time the early bird gets the worm and all the rest of it. So that's the first point. And the second point is that you can do it. You absolutely can do it. There are people who are thriving in these careers right now, who are exactly like you, wherever it is that you're at. So I just want to leave you with two things. You know, for me personally, making this switch really was a revolutionary change in my own career. You know, I went from somebody, who was middle of their class from a second tier law school, who was practicing and just sort of feeling like I hoped that I would just survive my career for the next 40 years and whenever I… And and the reason that I felt like that is because I was on the wrong track. I was in the wrong space. Once I switched, everything changed so much so that I get to speak to people like Sarah now and I get to do podcasts and all the rest of it. So, you know, a shift in perspective is sometimes worth like 40 happiness points. So just think about it, if that's what you think, that is what you want to do.

Sarah Cottrell: Love it. Love it. Thank you so much, Ben. Where can people find you if they're interested in learning more about what you're doing with Reframe?

Ben Chiriboga: LinkedIn. I'm the only Ben Chiriboga on LinkedIn. The other one is Benjamin Chiriboga and he's my second cousin, so that's not him. But he lives in Austria. I'm not Austrian. I'm half Ecuadorian and his mom is Austrian, so now he lives in Austria. So anyway, those are the only two of us on there. So you can find me there. That's me on there. Or just go to reframe.lawyer. And I would love for you to sign up for one of our masterclasses. If this is what you want to do, you know, and you really think about this is the year now, basically sign up and hopefully what you get is a map to where you can go. And then you can work with people like Sarah to really sort of like get in on that. We'll give you the map, you know, work with Sarah to really sort of think about what's the next step on that map for you.

Sarah Cottrell: Awesome. Okay. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. I think that this is, like you said, this field is just like growing and growing and I am really glad that we've been able to share so much good information with the listeners today. So thanks.

Ben Chiriboga: Thank you. Thank you for creating this space.

Sarah Cottrell: Thanks so much for listening. I absolutely love getting to share this podcast with you. If you haven't yet, I invite you to download my free guide, First Steps to Leaving the Law at formerlawyer.com/first. Until next time, have a great week.