Matthew Coatney, CIO at Thompson Hine, and author of The Human Cloud sits down and talks about what he sees as the transformation of how we work. According to Coatney, freelancing and project-based work (The Human Cloud) combined with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (The Machine Cloud) will soon disrupt the way we deliver work. Law firms will not be exempt from this disruption. Matters are really just projects.  Contract attorneys are freelancers. According to some experts, 80% of work to be done by organizations in the 2030s will be project-based work. And AI and ML will eat into the other 20%. Coatney says that we are missing out on an opportunity if we are not preparing for this reality.

We asked how life as a CIO has changed over the past couple of decades for a CIO in a law firm and Coatney says that a CIO of 2000 would have culture shock if they were to be transported to today. CIOs are still the brand ambassadors of the IT departments, but Chief Technology Officers and Chief Data Officers are making their way into the fold to help offload some of the overwhelming responsibility that many of today’s CIOs find falls on their shoulders.

Matt also co-hosts The Human Cloud Podcast with Matthew Mottola where they put out twice-weekly episodes diving deeper into these topics. Go check out “The Matthews” on their own pod if you’re curious about how the structure of work is going to change.

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Information Inspirations
You may have noticed that we took last week off from this podcast, but we were busy recording other podcasts to fill the void.
Greg went on the Legal Value Network’s “Off the Clock” podcast and talked with Keith Maziarek of Katten and Percipent’s Chad Main about the recent increase of available APIs from a number of legal information vendors. These APIs may very well open the door to a much easier method of pulling data in from vendors directly into internal law firm databases to better prepare firms to handle clients’ needs.
Marlene hosted an ILTA podcast panel on How Virtual Hearings Altered the Fabric of Dispute Resolution with Florida Circuit Judge Christopher Sprysenski, Trial Consultant with Paul Hastings, Jeremy Cooper, and Partner at Jackson Walker, Richard Howell. The three give their personal experiences on how they handled virtual trials over the past twenty months.
Contact Us
Twitter: @gebauerm or @glambert.
Voicemail: 713-487-7270
Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com.
Music: As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca.
Transcript

Marlene Gebauer  0:12

Welcome to The Geek in Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer

Greg Lambert  0:19

And I’m Greg Lambert. Well, Marlene, we decided to take last week off in you get to go. Let’s spend the weekend in Santa Fe. So how was that?

Marlene Gebauer  0:29

That was great. I very, very, very much needed a break to keep my sanity. So it did that.

Greg Lambert  0:36

Yeah, there’s, and I’m sure there’s nothing that a little silver and turquoise jewelry can’t fix right?

Marlene Gebauer  0:44

Well, I’ll say that it’s it was more the great outdoors that I got to experience that really, really helped.

Greg Lambert  0:51

Good. Well, I’m glad you had a great time there. And before we get to this week’s guest, let’s talk about our information inspiration.

Greg Lambert  1:05

So both of our information inspirations this week are actually from other podcasts that we’ve done this week. So we took a week off for ourselves and did two other podcasts, though. So I get to completely geek out this week with Keith Maziarek and Chad Main on the Legal Value Network’s Off the Clock podcast. And we talked a lot about the increase in legal vendors allowing API access to their data, and how that could play a role in positioning firms into better predicting how they need to react to their own clients’ need. So I’m not really sure how Chad got our over, I know, it was over an hour long conversation that we had, he got it down, I think to about 30 minutes and did a great job distilling that into just the relevant pieces of information. But it was a lot of fun. And I really think that for those of us that are either in the law library or marketing, business development, technology, pricing practically any of the business support divisions of a law firm, these API’s, they’re going to offer a lot of opportunity here in leveraging that external data with our internal data. So and I say this in the podcast, if you like jigsaw puzzles, and putting them together, especially really hard jigsaw, jigsaw puzzle, then I think I think this podcast is for you. And these API’s are for you as well.

Marlene Gebauer  2:37

Yeah. And so what I did is I hosted in moderated and ILTA panel podcast covering how virtual hearings altered the fabric of dispute resolution. So I talked with Florida Circuit Judge Christopher Christopher Sprysenski, Jeremy Cooper, trial consultant with Paul Hastings, and Richard Howell partner at Jackson Walker, whose name I got from you, Greg, thank you. The three panelists talked about their personal experiences of online trials and what they liked and didn’t like about the process. It was really interesting to hear the three perspectives and some of the lessons that each learned as they went along. You know, of course, since I had them together, you know, I had to see if they had any funny stories to share. We all remember the poor Texas lawyer who turned himself into a cat, right.

Greg Lambert  3:25

I’m here judge, and I’m not a cat

Marlene Gebauer  3:27

and I’m not a cat. They had a couple good stories to tell people who didn’t know they were on camera and some prop failures which required quick sewing repairs.

Greg Lambert  3:36

Yeah, that was interesting that he had a sewing kit ready to go.

Marlene Gebauer  3:39

I love that he had a sewing kit.

Greg Lambert  3:41

Well, you know, Richard is like he said he’s a partner at my firm. And I love the comment that he made about online trials taking away this advantage of him being a six-foot eight-inch tall person in normal life.

Marlene Gebauer  3:58

I never would have known that unless he had I never would have known that. He dropped that.

Greg Lambert  4:02

Well, I can tell you standing next to him. He’s quite an imposing character when you right next to him so

Marlene Gebauer  4:10

And that wraps up this week’s information inspirations.

Greg Lambert  4:18

Marlene due to a scheduling a snafu. I got to do this interview by myself. But I will tell you, you were definitely missed here.

Marlene Gebauer  4:29

Yeah, I listened afterward. It’s really a great interview. It’s like that they did that was a lot of fun.

Greg Lambert  4:35

So I sat down with Matthew Coatney and talked about his work as a CIO as the Thompson Hine and about his book and podcast with the same name, The Human Cloud.

Greg Lambert  4:48

We’d like to welcome Matthew Cody CIO at Thompson Hein. Matt is also the author of The Human Cloud and has a podcast with the same name that he co-hosts with Matt Mattola. So Matt, welcome to The Geek in Review.

Matthew Coatney  5:03

Thank you, Greg, it is wonderful to see you again and to be able to connect,

Greg Lambert  5:07

Before we jumped on we were talking about your podcast and we will circle back to that as well as the book. But I’m going to hit you with kind of a big question right off the top here. I have some friends that we talked about, you can you could take a lawyer from like the late 90s and plunk them down in, in today. And other than maybe updating some of the technology, they pretty much operate as they did 20 years ago. Now, a CIO. On the other hand, let me throw this situation to you. If you take a CIO from, say, the early 2000s. And you were to take them out of time and plunk them down today, what would be the biggest difference that they would quickly discover?

Matthew Coatney  5:53

Yeah, well, I think that would first be a culture shock, like no other. It would be,

Greg Lambert  5:59

it’s not all dudes?

Matthew Coatney  6:01

Well, that too, thankfully, thankfully. And much more. I mean, just totally, totally different world than it was 20 years ago. And I think there are a lot of differences. And we talked about a few but the one that comes to mind, I’ll give credit when credit do is do the current CIO of WilmerHale, Adrian White, who was my boss, when I was there, many years ago, he labeled this the big shift. And he’s a funny guy, when he’d said he’d sort of take a pause for dramatic effect and say, the big shift … the big shift, and it was, and he talked a lot about and then, you know, that’s, that’s a lot what I’ve seen and, and helped with, as well as this pivot from what was plumbing and infrastructure and computers, right, you’re the, you’re the IT guy that fixes the computers, much more into a, you know, trying to not use too many trite buzzwords, but sort of the, the strategic enabler, right, you’re the person that is helping law firms, hopefully, to your point, make it so that it is harder for a lawyer from the 1990s to drop into a law firm of today and say, What have I got myself into? So it’s a lot around digitization and, you know, search and knowledge management data as a tool, and really driving a firm more toward a streamlined process-oriented technology-enabled organization. And that’s a big shift. That’s big. That is a big shift.

Greg Lambert  7:32

Yeah, cuz I mentioned back in the day, it was you were more about, you know, network and storage that this is a repository.

Matthew Coatney  7:40

Yeah. And it wasn’t, those weren’t table stakes back then. I mean, you could get it really wrong. And there were firms that had real big problems that that disrupted the practice of law. But that has changed, and so much of what we can provide now, it’s not easy, but it’s well, well known. Well tried.

Greg Lambert  7:59

You think a lot of a lot of that is well, I think it’s it, there’s probably two sides of the story, but more of the adoption of cloud based technology and storage, rather than everything having to be on prem is that?

Matthew Coatney  8:14

Yeah, definitely, definitely. I call it moving up the stack. And I’m a software developer as well. So you sort of move up the stack to more abstract concepts. And I mean, there are there are many firms and other organizations that had to worry about, you know, how do we get heating and cooler how do we get cooling into a data center room? How do we have fire suppressants for our servers I’m very, very important but minutia kinda decisions all that’s taken care of now. Yeah. And you don’t have to worry about it

Greg Lambert  8:40

man that brought back some memories, because I was I cut my teeth on an old IBM 9000 IBM mainframe. And so that was one of the things we had to do was we had to cool the room. We had to have a fire suppression. There was a big red button behind glass when you walked in, that would shut off all the power. And it was so cool. It was so tempting to press that red button. It was just

Matthew Coatney  9:06

to see what happens. Yeah, I will tell one brief back in the day story that I worked at a startup where our my office was a high bay garage with the air conditioner backed up to it so the door didn’t close all the way. And I’d be sitting there working as a as a young developer and like literally several times a squirrel would run up look at me, I’d look at it. And then it scurry back off under the door. But our server room I’m doing air quotes for those that are listening. Our server room was a closet and the AC went out and we actually had to add an Engineer Engineer reroute some air conditioning from another part of the building through the ductwork and down into the server room. So

Greg Lambert  9:46

yeah, down into the closeted server room. Yeah, yes. Yeah. Well, I’ve got my my squirrel story off the air, but I will say when I was at OU, there was a suicidal squirrel that jumped into it. transformer and caused all kinds of havoc. So let it I think people can probably fill in the blanks from there. So yes, you kind of touched on it a little bit in your answer on this. But where do you see the role of CIO in IT as a relates to things like knowledge management, you know, you get innovation and analytics, you know, what, what should the traditional IT department do today that they haven’t been doing?

Matthew Coatney  10:30

Yeah. And, you know, and this plays out in both my current role, and then in a prior role, I was consulting into and serving as a sort of a virtual or fractional CIO for many firms than in a consulting capacity. And first off, I’ll say that those table stakes I mentioned, no less important, they’re not as snazzy and they often don’t get paid a lot of attention outside of IT, but you absolutely have to like that has to work, this stuff has to work and work 100% of the time, or everything else you try to do will be for naught. And so having a strong team that finds that important and does a good job is critical. One, I’m thankful to have such a team here, but the role is definitely expanded. So in addition to that core, a lot of its centers around two areas. One is what you just mentioned, which was the data and information side of the house. And if you think about that, as everything that is structured and unstructured that a firm creates, in some way or another traditional CIO used to just provide the backing for that. But increasingly, what we’re seeing is with software and machine learning, and everything else sort of coming to the fore, we need to provide more than just that foundation, we need to provide the tools and the capabilities and the access and almost like the governance and sort of curation and adoption of both tools and data. But the other side of that is not everything that is innovative has to be you know, a really snazzy AI tool, it can, it can be as simple as just doing something smarter and cheaper and easier than you did a day ago. And so a lot of that’s like it’s adoption, it’s project management, it’s business analysis. It’s a lot of sort of core corporate transformation skills that I see increasingly in IT departments and firms.

Greg Lambert  12:26

Yeah, yeah, I think I had a similar conversation this week with my CIO. And, and we both agreed that not everything has a technology answer. And

Matthew Coatney  12:39

100%

Greg Lambert  12:40

Shouldn’t have a technology answer, there are just some things that you just need to be doing. Smarter technology may be a part of that. But you know, not everything can be automated, nor should everything be automated.

Matthew Coatney  12:52

That’s right.

Greg Lambert  12:53

On the flip side of that, are there some things now that you that you should not be doing and just let the practitioners do instead?

Matthew Coatney  13:03

Yeah, I do think and we’re, we’re still a little bit in the bubble. Like, we’re not the technology’s not quite there yet. But I think within the next few years, it will be and it’s the whole citizen, developer, citizen data analyst, whatever you want to call this citizen data scientists, there’s so many different terms for it. But it’s basically, I think that IT can provide, again, moving up the stack a little bit more of the plumbing around the tools that let people analyze their own data, create value, create mini applications, without it being the bottleneck. And I don’t mean that in a negative way. It’s just a capacity, you know, there’s way more things to be done, than there are people to do it. If you can distribute that, and give them guardrails and tools to do it safely and effectively. Great. I’m all for that. And we and we I’ve done that at other firms recently, and, you know, exploring that where I am now.

Greg Lambert  14:02

Do you think CIOs are ready to give up? Give up? Well, and I think it’s so much I don’t think it’s so much an ego thing is just it’s it’s a worry of, you know, like you said, the table stakes now are you expect stability, you expect the network to always be going, you expect the email to flow the like I’ve said for years, the the the network is your work, if you want to meet your neighbor, that you haven’t seen in a while, watch the network go down, because everyone then drifts out into the hallways and start seeing seeing each other for the first time. Except for the COVID stuff. So let me talk about you a little bit here. So you can spend Oh,

Matthew Coatney  14:47

yeah, sorry, but before before we go there, I think that that is worth you know, there is around your comment about there are things that Is that something the CIO is willing to let go of? And I will say that this the CIO as it’s envisioned in the current and most firms, it’s a pretty expansive role to pretty daunting role. And it’s the expectations that are lobbed on those individuals, you have to have a fairly sort of unique, very multidisciplinary background in order to pull that off. And I think that’s a hard ask, especially in today’s, you know, labor demand with so many technologists that can move out of industry. So my point being is that I think that we could get to a time when we follow what other industries have done and actually break out the CIO and what’s called the CIO and CTO not talent, but technology, the Chief Technology Officer, someone that runs security on the back end. Yeah. And then you have an information officer that does more of that, or a Data Officer or whatever you’d like to call it. Right. We talked about it, but that,

Greg Lambert  15:55

that, and I think there are some firms doing that already, aren’t there?

Matthew Coatney  15:58

There are, there are, Yes. Dynamics on the market. Yeah,

Greg Lambert  16:03

that’s right. There’s, there’s, there’s, you know, only so much capacity that one person should be able to really take on. In that same vein, and then I’ll get to you a little bit does. Are we now looking outside the industry at talent to come in as the as a CIO? Or are we still looking for someone that was, you know, at another peer law firm to come over?

Matthew Coatney  16:31

There is still a bit of that for sure. Because, in many ways, the CIO is still the chief ambassador for IT throughout the firm. And so you need someone that understands what a practices and how it operates, and how lawyers are different than others. But I will say I think, I think professional services like management consulting, I have known some that have come out of industry and been successful, including my predecessor at another multiple firms. So I do I think there’s a track record there. I would like to see more of it. And I have started, I have been for a while hiring from the management consulting ranks for some key innovation and adoption roles. And it does I mean, you know, Greg, what it’s like, it takes some time, there’s a bit of that culture shock of like, what is a law firm and what’s going on here, but once you, you know, get immersed into it, maybe a year or two in, those folks become really, really valuable.

Greg Lambert  17:29

That makes sense. So And speaking of other experiences, you actually spent some time of your professional career outside of the legal industry. You know, what were some of the lessons that you learned from your experiences outside of law firms that you were able to bring in and apply inside of law firms?

Matthew Coatney  17:52

Yeah, yeah. One one you actually alluded to earlier, I, when I was younger, and my career was as a software developer, so the world was a a nail, and I was a hammer coming after it no matter what. And yeah, I quickly learned after well, not too quickly, I’m a slow learner. After many failures, I realized, hey, this really isn’t working, let’s take a pause, let’s approach it differently. And so a lot of the change management methodologies, project management, sort of the core skills that I think everybody should have going forward, those are harder to find in law firms. And so that’s, that’s number one is just bringing that kind of discipline, sort of a corporate way of looking at things into a law firm has been hugely helpful. That’s a mindset and a set of tech tools. And then beyond that the management structure of a professional services organization, particularly looking at the transition they went through from the KPMG s and the Arthur Andersen’s of the day to now Accenture and Deloitte Consulting and sort of all the spin offs that happened as a result of conflicts of interest. They were sort of forced to shift into a very different model very quickly. And I do think, the, the path they carved and they had to learn a lot of things the hard way, I think you can look at some of those organizations today and pluck out what’s working for them. And that’s things like a strong centralized culture, strong, centralized corporate core, with a much more adaptable periphery for the practice groups, right? So there’s, it’s not as much of every practice group sort of does their own thing with light core. And the larger firms are doing this already, as you know, so it’s building more of that strong core, but then giving capabilities Best Practices templates that practices can use more repeatedly, so that they can grow more quickly without reinventing things every time. And that’s, I mean, that’s the crux of knowledge management and process improvement, all that kind of other good stuff is really about that in my mind.

Greg Lambert  20:00

What would be some of the biggest differences between the, you know, the Accentures out there? And the large law firms? Is our technology and, you know, the IT groups, Are they set up internally more to service on the office level, the practice group level, the client level, what are you seeing as work and how things are structured?

Matthew Coatney  20:24

Yeah, it’s much less practice group driven. So it is similar to a law firm, where you have more of a centralized corporate IT back when they had offices, they would have, you know, local IT within each office. But it was very much centralized. I think the difference had more to do not on the core technology, but on the information side of the house. So A, the kinds of things that we’re used to in a law firm, such as an enterprise search tool, or document management, or portal, those kind of things. They had all those, they were just much more heavily invested in much more central, much better adoption. And it really was the lifeblood, particularly of an organization like Accenture, where I think they do it better than anybody else. And so you do you see a, it becomes part of the fabric, there’s a lot of thought and care and structure given to those things that we try to do in a law firm. But I just think from an investment perspective, it’s not quite there.

Greg Lambert  21:25

Without trying to get you into trouble. What do you think is the key motivation on the professional services side versus what the motivation is that creates a difference on the apps?

Matthew Coatney  21:38

And I, I do, I think, on this a lot, and it, it feels to me, although I don’t know what the right, I don’t know what the right outcome is the right path. But those organizations are, you know, generally public concerns, their focus are growth, their focus is on growth and on sustainable scalable growth. So that is an engine that drives the necessity for a lot more ingenuity to propel that kind of like, you can’t just sort of do what you did yesterday. 3% better, and everybody’s happy. And, and there’s nothing but again, there’s I don’t think there’s anything wrong, because you do see practice, you see private professional services groups, like accounting and advisors and others that are very similar to law firms in their growth approach, slow organic, partnership models, and it’s hard to argue that that’s bad, as long as it still works. But to me, that’s the big difference. Yeah. And when it doesn’t work anymore, we’ll see the change.

Greg Lambert  22:43

Yes, yeah. Well, that’s kind of a common thing is when something is on fire, then you will see change.

Matthew Coatney  22:52

We’ve been talking about. We’ve been talking about it as an industry for 15 years. And we still haven’t seen it yet.

Greg Lambert  22:59

But I’m sure once the pandemic’s over, everything will change. So you’ve written a lot and talked a lot about just the future of work and things like how freelancing or project-based work more generally, and things like artificial intelligence, are impacting on how we’re getting work done? Are those really relevant in our industry setting? Or? Or do they apply more often outside the legal?

Matthew Coatney  23:33

I feel like they absolutely apply in the legal profession. And we just, we’re actually doing a lot of it now. We just call it by different names. And because of that, you would just

Greg Lambert  23:48

stick the term legal in front of it. Project management? No, it’s legal project management.

Matthew Coatney  23:54

legal project management, spot on spot on. And it’s, I think, the challenge with doing that I understand because it makes it maybe a little bit more palatable to the profession to say, Well, we do things differently. So we need something tailored to us. But then we lose out on all of the other innovations and advancements in those other industries that just call it by what it is, you know, a matter is a project and contract attorneys are freelancers. So, you know, we’re doing so much of this right now. And artificial intelligence or machine learning. You know, there’s much to say that the things that we use today in email and document management are getting close to that if not there already. So it’s it’s pervasive in what we do. I do think that there isn’t, there is an opportunity. I was actually just we’re chatting on our podcast just before this about with someone that is in the project management consulting space, and he works a lot with Harvard Business Review. So he’s connected in that industry. And the estimates for project based work in organizations going forward 80% of work to be done by organizations in the 2030s. And beyond 80% will be project driven. And AI will quickly sort of eat at the other 20% that’s not. And so I think we’re missing out on an opportunity to say, how are we? If we think about this, not differently, but the same as what other industries are doing? What can we leverage to optimize and improve upon what we have today?

Greg Lambert  25:29

Well, let’s, let’s talk briefly about your book. So you wrote a book called The Human Cloud, and you also have a podcast, I want to get to the podcast here in a minute. But so what was the motivation behind writing the book? And? And tell us a little bit about the theme of that?

Matthew Coatney  25:50

Yeah, yeah. So I’ll start with the theme. And then I’ll do a quick origin story. But the theme is everything that I that we really just talked about its future of work. It’s, it’s the intersection of freelancing, which is more of my co workers experience, and artificial intelligence machine learning, which is my background and how those two trends are coming together to disrupt the way that we deliver work. But the story behind it was I actually, we met as freelancers. So he was looking to write a report on AI, I love to I’m a creative kind of guy. I like to create things. So I was actually on a freelance platform just as a side gig to scratch that itch. And I wrote the report for him. And then he said, Famous last words, he says, I’m working on a book. It’s almost done. But I’d love someone with some street credit to come and sort of just lend your name to the book. Well, yeah, it was easy. Easy. Yeah. So like a year and a half later, and you know, numerous revisions, but it was a blast. I had always wanted to be a writer when I was a kid. This is not quite the kind of book that I was hoping to write. But I’ll take it. And yeah, so it’s been, but we actually finished it. Greg in the beginning of 2020. So it went to press, you know how the publication process works. It went to press in January of 2020, then COVID happened. And then it launched in January of this year. And so all of that, that we wrote was pre-pandemic, in my how like it’s, it’s become much more applicable, I would say now are all the topics that we said this will come in the next decade. just fast forward to today.

Greg Lambert  27:26

Yeah, I think that’s been one one of the things especially what you know, and we got to give the CIO and IT guys and, everyone credit because we could not have transitioned from March 13 to March 16. On-site to off-site if there wasn’t a decade plus worth of preparation. Alright, now comes the fun part. I’ve been I’ve been holding back on this. And, and so let’s talk about the podcast that you do with Matthew Mattola. I love that nickname. It does the podcast with the Matthews in the young one in the old one. Which one are you?

Matthew Coatney  28:12

I am definitely the old one. He is 29 Maybe 30. It’s it makes me weep.

Greg Lambert  28:22

That’s not fair.  I was much older at 29 than he is. So So I listened I listened to it. The the discussions fun you guys have have a lot of fun doing it. I thought Marlene and I had a lot of fun. But you guys really have have a lot of fun off this.

Greg Lambert  28:41

Next level.

Matthew Coatney  28:42

If someone hasn’t listened to it, and they take the time to listen to it now what what should they expect to what what are? What are the topics that you do? And who are some of the guests that you’ve had on?

Matthew Coatney  28:52

Yeah, so it’s First off, it’s like the book. It’s it’s a fair bit irreverent. And we don’t take our two selves too seriously, we goof around quite a bit. But we do try to cover some serious topics too. So we talk a lot about current events, particularly as it relates to the freelance economy, leadership, technology, AI disruption, all those kinds of stuff, but we try to wrap it in to a little bit more synthesis. And I’m I’m old even for my years because I love history. And I’m sure Matt gets tired of me. The other Matt gets tired of me going back but I’m like, well in the 1980s or in the 1700s. But we do I try to pull sort of some themes forward from the past to put what we’re going through today in some context and but we do we alternate weekly. We have both a current events, sort of just the two of us shooting the breeze. And then we have a usually on Mondays and then later in the week we release an interview usually with some kind of leader in this space, mostly friends, because it’s fun that way. It is good to have friends. You know, that’s having done this for many years now. I’m not sure what we were thinking about releasing today. episodes a week in real time. Yeah, that may change over time. It may be every other week or something.

Greg Lambert  30:05

It’s okay, that says, You know what? There’s, there’s no requirement that you have to stay the same. But I will say the requirement is that you do still have to have fun and and you guys have a lot of fun. So who, who have been some of the guests and what have you guys talked about?

Matthew Coatney  30:26

Yeah. So we’ve had, we’ve had everything from a freelancer in Europe, sort of a digital nomad that’s living on a beach off of Portugal or Spain right now. All the way through to exactly yes. We had a head of freelance economy, it’s actually coming out. Today, as we’re recording, this is the head of the freelance product team at a company called Koch Industries. That’s like a manufacturing and production stuff in the middle of America in Kansas. And we’ve had, we had a colleague of mine that now leads digital learning for Bain Consulting. So you know, again, global footprint, and we just interviewed a, he was, I worked with him at a law firm. So he did project and portfolio management, a law firm now as an independent consultant, author and musician. And so he is a brilliant guy. That’s one of my favorite so far.

Greg Lambert  31:24

Good. Well, it is it is a lot of fun. And it’s, it’s called the Human Cloud Podcast.

Matthew Coatney  31:30

That’s right. Modify all that good stuff,

Greg Lambert  31:33

all those good stuff. So yeah, if you if you haven’t listened to it, listeners, I highly suggest it. It’s very fun to listen to so well. Matthew Coatney, I appreciate you taking the time to talk with us. It’s been been fun.

Matthew Coatney  31:49

It’s been a lot of fun. I really appreciate the opportunity. It was good to get to catch up again.

Greg Lambert  31:58

Well, the the podcast with the Matthews, I love that. It’s a really fun one to listen to. So if you haven’t listened to it, I suggest that you do it. I wanted to somehow live like the guests that they talked about who works on the beach in Spain or Portugal. I want that job. How do I how do I get that job?

Marlene Gebauer  32:19

I think I should got to just follow that model. Yeah.

Greg Lambert  32:22

Maybe Maybe I should just move and just and then see how the

Marlene Gebauer  32:26

Figure it out as you go along?

Greg Lambert  32:28

Sure. That’s how I live life anyway. So well, in you know, in seriously, there. I think there’s a lot of opportunities, both as a worker and as a business, in this concept of looking at all work as projects in staffing accordingly to that. And I think he’s right, you know, all matters are really projects. It’s a big ask, I think for law firms to kind of restructure how they, how they look at the work. But you know, as with most change in the world, there will be those who get on board and the those who are left behind, so and there’s any time to really make that change. Now is the time to do it.

Marlene Gebauer  33:10

Well, particularly since you know, you have these large firms. You know, if you’re going to make the change, it’s gonna take some time and you know, you have to start you have to start prepping early.

Greg Lambert  33:23

Absolutely. Well, thanks again to Matthew Coatney. Cio from Thomson Hine in the author and podcast host of The Human Cloud for talking with me.

Marlene Gebauer  33:31

And of course, thanks to all of you for taking the time to listen to The Geek in Review podcast. If you enjoy the show, share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you. So reach out to us on social media. I can be found at @gebauerm on Twitter,

Greg Lambert  33:45

and I can be found @glambert and on Twitter,

Marlene Gebauer  33:48

or you can leave us a voicemail on The Geek in Review Hotline at 713-487-7270. And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry Davis. Thank you, Jerry.

Greg Lambert  34:00

Thanks, Jerry. All right, Marvin. I will talk with you.

Marlene Gebauer  34:03

Okay, bye bye.