Intro: Meet Marcia Narine Weldon
00:00–03:00
Electra introduces Marcia, Professor at the University of Miami School of Law and head of its Transactional Skills Program. Marcia shares her unique background, including her time as a GC, COO, and Chief Sustainability Officer.
The GC’s Expanding Role
03:00–07:00
Marcia discusses how the role of the general counsel has evolved beyond legal advice to include operations, sustainability, and executive leadership—particularly in crisis and ESG contexts.
Training Tomorrow’s In-House Lawyers
07:00–13:00
They dive into how Marcia prepares her students to be more than just “legal issue spotters.” She emphasizes the importance of business acumen, stakeholder communication, and internal advocacy.
From Firefighter to Strategist
13:00–18:00
Marcia reflects on the shift from reactive lawyering to proactive business alignment. She explains why legal teams must anticipate problems and contribute to strategy from day one.
Teaching Legal Ops and Tech Without the Jargon
18:00–23:00
How do you teach law students and new lawyers about operations, KPIs, and even AI? Marcia shares how she demystifies these topics by focusing on outcomes and value—not buzzwords.
AI, Contracts, and the Future of Lawyering
23:00–28:00
A lively segment on where AI fits in legal education and contract work. Marcia discusses both opportunities and challenges, stressing the need for strong fundamentals before adopting tech.
Outro
28:00–End
Final thoughts on empowering the next generation of legal professionals to lead, communicate, and operate like business partners—not just legal gatekeepers.
Full Transcript
Electra Japonas (00:07)
Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of Future Contracts. Today I have a very special guest with me Marcia Noreen Weldon. Marcia, it’s an absolute pleasure to have you here.
Marcia Narine Weldon (00:18)
It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks so much.
Electra Japonas (00:21)
Marcia, you’ve had a really unusual mix of experiences, so big law, corporate compliance, ethics oversight, and now you’re in legal education. What is the moment in your journey that made you change the way you see the legal profession?
Marcia Narine Weldon (00:38)
No, I went to law school and I wanted to come out and do public interest and save the world and help the poor and the indigent. And then I came out between college and law school with about 200 and something thousand debt. And I realized I’m not the poor and the indigent, but I really was not necessarily in a position. So I actually went to big law. But when I went to big law, I still had that pro bono bug in me. And my law firm that I went to, Cleary Gottlieb, did a lot of pro bono impact litigation. And I was able to see the power of the law to help people who don’t have any power.
Now, the law can also hurt people who don’t have any power. think so doing that kind of impact litigation, and even now when I work in areas of business and human rights and other areas, the huge gap with access to justice is significant. And I teach law students who their big goal, and I don’t necessarily promote this, is to go into big law or to go to the most prestigious place, partly because they also have debt, but partly because law schools gear people toward that unless you come in saying, I want to
work in social justice or something like that. We geared people toward going a certain direction. And the ironic thing is that the happiest lawyers I know make the least amount of money. They’re in public interest. They work for the government. They do things that align with their spirit. And I see so many of my graduate and so many of my legal peers that aren’t happy because they’re not doing what they really want to do. And the practice of law has become more drudgery and more work.
than they expected. ⁓ And hopefully that’s going to change. But they’re not doing the interesting strategic thinking they thought they were going to be doing when they sat in law school and pondered big problems. So I think the short answer to that long answer was that I think we need to focus more on kind of what aligns with us and how we can use law to help. Not just big corporations, because big corporations need help too. I used to work for big corporations and they need help too. But how can we spread our legal knowledge in a way?
that will help people who really need it as well.
Electra Japonas (02:40)
Yeah, I’m just going to pick up on something that you mentioned there around change. When people say that the legal system is slow to change, do you agree or do you think we’re asking it to change in wrong ways?
Marcia Narine Weldon (02:55)
Well, the legal system is slow to change because the legal system tends to react. We regulate after a scandal, in large part because lawyers aren’t taught to think in certain ways. They think about loopholes from a legal perspective, but not in terms of how people behave. So we like to focus on doing things after the fact. This is a problem. Let’s make a rule about it. Let’s make a policy about it. Let’s make a law about it. So we’re focusing on the outputs and not enough
on the inputs about why are we making these changes? What needs to change? And what’s the role of the legal system in it? And the problem is, even if you have the ecosystem of a law firm, you’ve got committees and partners committees and the people that have voted about it and then they’ve got to think about it and then you’ve got to change all your IT systems and then you’ve got to think about whether the clients like it. So sometimes some systems, whether it’s the legal system macro or law firms or other institutions at a micro level.
There’s too many layers and too much bureaucracy so that people can’t make the decisions to change quickly even if they wanted to.
Electra Japonas (03:56)
Yeah, I recorded a podcast very recently with a legal designer who came at the same problem that you’ve just outlined in a different way, but I’ve never actually thought of it in the way that you’ve just articulated it.
So her perspective is that there is a lack of user centricity in the legal profession and legal design as a concept and design thinking as applied to law is something that can help us overcome it. But I’d never thought of it in terms that you’ve just stated, which is that we are very reactive and by the nature of the role, we are very reactive and we regulate after the event and we write that we think of outputs and there’s not enough emphasis on input.
Do you think that will ever change? I know you’ve just mentioned the complexity of kind of the layered system in the legal ecosystem, but is there a way to change that? we going to see some sort of impetus with AI that’s going to force us out of that comfort zone?
Marcia Narine Weldon (04:55)
⁓ I think AI is forcing everybody out of its comfort zone and you know that more than anybody else. But before we even get to that, I want to get to the concept of design thinking because it’s something that has been a huge part ⁓ in how I practice. ⁓ And I started learning about design thinking 15 years ago from a colleague of mine at University of Miami, Michelle DiStefano, ⁓ who runs this program called Law Without Walls. Back when I was a deputy general counsel to all that kind of stuff in-house, she approached me and said, know, do you want to be a part of this program?
And for 15 years, she’s been doing ⁓ design sprints and hackathons with lawyers, business people, and law students and business students, having them actually learn to think in a very different way. How do we question things? Lawyers are quick to jump to the solution without really understanding the problem and without even understanding how to reframe the problem. Lawyers typically, by the way, get very frustrated with this because we’re not trained to think that way.
On the other hand, I also teach a course ⁓ in the engineering school, Ethics and Technology, ⁓ in a new program that’s Innovation Technology and Design. Michelle and I actually co-taught a design thinking class with them. ⁓ The first year, they have to do design thinking and they do design challenges every semester. So when it came for me to teach the sophomores about ethics, technology and AI, et cetera, they’re already asking questions in a very different way. ⁓ They also get a cross-functional education. They’re taught.
These engineering students are taught by people from the business school, the med school, the undergrad, the law school. So the way they are conceptualizing problems is very different. Whereas lawyers, we tend to get taught by the law professors, some who’ve been practicing maybe two or three years before they went into teach, which is now the ideal model, which is itself a tragedy in the United States. I’ll just leave it at that. ⁓ But often professors are teaching the same way they’ve been teaching.
for 20 years, we’ve got this product method, we don’t really get people to think about risks outside of legal risks. And all of these are areas where I think thinking differently, whether it’s through design thinking, whether it’s thinking more cross functionally out of the silos, which of course exists in in-house departments and law firms as well, our ecosystem and how we think about it needs to change because we’re so used to being the experts and we’re not used to thinking.
there might be another way to approach this problem. Because it’s worked for us for all this time, it’s not going to keep working though.
Electra Japonas (07:22)
Yeah.
Yeah, I agree. And you run a transactional skills program that doesn’t just teach contracts, you also teach context and judgment and real world complexity. I think that you do strive to give your students this cross-functional exposure. What does legal education in your view need more of right now?
Marcia Narine Weldon (07:46)
Well, we need less of memorization and rote memorization, and we need more of thinking, again, differently. So what we’re trying to focus on in our transactional skills program is the same thing that lawyers learning anything, business risks, the language of business, financial risks, geopolitical issues. We’ll learn about things in constitutional law or other kinds of things, but how do those geopolitical risks
Electra Japonas (07:50)
Yes.
Marcia Narine Weldon (08:14)
come into play when you’re designing a contract, right? How might your force majeure clause look a little bit different? And if we’re just thinking about people in transactional law, you’ve cut and paste. Nobody’s starting from scratch, obviously. You use good precedence. But how are we thinking about what we’ve just cut and pasted? So from the law school perspective, the reason lawyers aren’t coming out quote,
practice ready, which in many schools, by the way, is a bad word because they think we’re not a trade school. We’re not a vocational school. On the other hand, you’ve got law firms saying law students are coming out without knowing how to do anything, nothing practical. They can do legal research. Why do we need them? And I, by the way, when I was in house for many years, I did not pay for the work of first year associates. That was years ago. It was before AI. I would definitely not pay for the work of a first year associate now. So when I’m teaching the students, I pretty much say I wouldn’t pay for you.
So what I have to do is teach you how to be valuable in an era where there is an algorithm who can do what you do better, but can you now know what the algorithm missed? And if you don’t have the underlying, and I think about this for junior lawyers and law firms and in-house as well, if you don’t have the underlying understanding of why these things are, what could go wrong, right? The United States,
Students go off the street from college to law school. They haven’t had any real work experience. They haven’t seen what happens when there’s scope creep in the contract, when people ignore the contract altogether. So how do you think about that risk? They haven’t thought about, all right, if there’s a tariff, how might that affect something that’s in here? I have a student that works for a company that use a lot of influencers, right? And when TikTok was gonna be banned, know, their contracts had foreseen these kinds of issues in large part because she took the class.
That’s what we need more of, of how do we get out of the classroom and think of the real world implications of everything we’re doing so that that is second nature, not an afterthought.
Electra Japonas (10:17)
Yeah, when I came out of university, I felt that I knew nothing. Like all the training that I’d had was…
sort of, I’m not going to say useless, but I wasn’t able to add value with the knowledge that I had. I felt like I had to have a completely new education when I’d got into the business world, when I’d got into the law firm, and then when I’d moved in house, had to, even from law firm to in house, it was a complete re-education. So yeah, I think that there is sort of a tendency to continue to train our students in the way that we trained them 20 years
years ago, and now with the evolution of technology, also the expectation from businesses, clients, colleagues, etc. How are students going to be able to add value? What is it that you teach them other than understanding the business context? How do you get them to partner with tools and with
Marcia Narine Weldon (11:16)
Well, I think they have to learn, you you talked about teaching judgment. It’s hard to teach judgment, by the way, you what mean? Because you have to learn, you get judgment by learning from your mistakes. And right now ⁓ we have a lot of students that have grown up without ever really having to look at mistakes in that way. And because they see failure as a terrible thing, right? They see making mistakes as something that’s impossible where you only learn from mistakes, right? When I was outside council, by the time people came to me, because was a litigator,
Electra Japonas (11:20)
is.
Mm-hmm.
Marcia Narine Weldon (11:46)
They were in so much trouble. didn’t matter what I said. said, if I said, you need to do this, this, and this, I said, okay. Then I went in-house and it was completely different. Why do we have to do that? Is somebody going to get arrested? Is this illegal versus unlawful? What’s the business issue? I had never heard those terms. I was used to being the, I have spoken, go do it. Right? And so now imagine you’re a law student that comes straight from college or maybe had a little bit of work experience, but not a lot of experience.
Electra Japonas (12:03)
Hahaha
Marcia Narine Weldon (12:11)
You’re taught a lot of theory. You don’t understand, you know, what can happen if you slip off the escalator, what happens in torts, but you haven’t really thought about the business consequences. That’s what I think we’re missing. And I think a lot of professors, and I don’t want to disparage professors, but I think a lot of professors aren’t really attuned to what the legal needs of the market are today, which are by the way, inherently contradictory. We have to work faster, but we have to apply our judgment.
We have to apply judgment that we may not have received because we’re not giving junior lawyers the training and the mentoring that they need. And we don’t allow mistakes. And you can’t learn. You can’t say, the reason we should do this is because I had a client that this happened to because we don’t let those things happen. So I don’t know how to solve this problem. I just do that. I know that there’s problems, but I know we have to think about things.
very differently. And there are a lot of professors and a lot of law schools that are doing that. I’m proud to be at University of Miami where we’re looking at those issues, especially with artificial intelligence. We have an AI lab. The university has a chief AI officer. Our dean and others are recommending integration of artificial intelligence into the coursework. And I think that helps, but we have to not forget that one piece of without some lived experience, without
an understanding of AI can look at the patterns. They’re going to do things much more quickly. But if you’re not understanding what AI might get wrong, and I’m not just talking about hallucinations, right? If you don’t know the right questions to ask, you’re going to think the output is much better than it is. And I worry that there is going to be a gap in training, not just in law schools, but definitely in law firms as partners and senior levels.
don’t have as much time to train. They don’t really know how to train or mentor. They don’t know how to give feedback. And associates often think of feedback as a tragic thing as opposed to feedback being a gift. So we have to change very much how we teach, how we train, and what we value both in law schools and in law firms. And I don’t have any answers to that. I just have a lot of things that we need to change.
Electra Japonas (14:28)
Yeah, I know. And that’s the beginning, right? But you just, you said something that I thought was really interesting about how failure is perceived to be a really terrible thing. Do you think the perception of failure has changed over the years?
Marcia Narine Weldon (14:42)
think people say it has, ⁓ but it depends on where you are. Now, of course, I’m not talking about let’s celebrate the bet the company failure that causes the stock price to drop and people to have to get laid off. But I think, for example, when we look at failure, we’ll do what’s called a root cause analysis to get to what happened and went wrong. By definition, that already puts people on the defensive. It’s very difficult for you to want to have that root cause discussion.
⁓ or that debrief if you know that fingers could be pointed. Just also neurobiologically, it makes you less likely to want to learn from mistakes. So I think how we recast quote failure as a learning experience and make it safe very early on to ask questions. I think the reason a lot of young lawyers and law students and even more senior lawyers quote fail is because they’re afraid to ask the questions, because they’re afraid to look stupid or they’re afraid
that they’re supposed to know something that they don’t. And the way that information is coming at us so quickly and the way the technological paces, changes are happening so much more quickly, from a cognitive perspective, it’s almost impossible for us to keep up. And that puts people further and further. So some people will fail because of inaction, because they don’t want to ask the question. And I see this with law students all the time, which is why we drill into them how to interview clients, how to ask tough questions, how to use AI to brainstorm about the questions to ask.
But even in the law firms, the junior lawyers that don’t feel like they can ask questions and think of failure, meaning I might get kicked out. The job market is slow, so I’ll just keep my head down. I just won’t ask the questions. I’ll try to learn by osmosis. So we are setting, no pun intended, we’re setting them up for failure by not acknowledging that failure is a part of the profession.
Electra Japonas (16:37)
Yeah, when I worked with lots of different startups, particularly in the fintech space, whenever there was something that went wrong, they did a retrospective analysis of what happened. They had a really clear methodology.
where they dissected the problem without judgment. It was just what went wrong? How can we learn from this? How do we not do this again? And how do we become better on the basis of the mistake that happened? that if you do that, then you are reframing failure as a learning opportunity. That sounds kind of cliched and maybe very obvious. But I think that that is something that I’ve noticed more and more with junior lawyers that come out of law school lately is that they are
I feel like, maybe I’m wrong, but I do feel like there is more fear of failure than there was before, where you were kind of, I think the world was a bit more forgiving. Maybe there’s just a lot of exposure or perceived exposure and this fear of scarcity coupled with the fear of being canceled or just general fear mindset, which I don’t think is conducive to progressing in your career, particularly at an age or a stage.
where you just need to be asking questions and not caring whether you look stupid because let’s face it, you probably are compared to someone who’s 10 years qualified and you don’t have the experience and that’s fine, you’re not expected to. But there does seem to be an inflated expectation or perceived expectation.
Marcia Narine Weldon (17:58)
Mm-hmm.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
part of it is, this is a generation that grew up with social media where everything is filtered, everything looks perfect, everything is curated. You’re going to do three takes before you post the 17 pictures that are taken before you’re to post something on Instagram. And it seems like it’s a trivial thing, but that really goes toward the, it’s got to be just right. And law firms are populated, especially in United States.
Electra Japonas (18:17)
Yes. Yeah.
Yes.
Marcia Narine Weldon (18:37)
by students who graduated from law schools where everything they’re taught is what went wrong and why this was wrong. When I teach business associations and I have my students brief a case, I tell them no business person is ever gonna care about these facts. Tell them what went wrong, how to fix it, that quickly, as opposed to dwelling on the problems. Let’s dwell on this is how you might do it differently. Here’s my advice for you, because that is how business people think.
Electra Japonas (18:44)
Mm-hmm.
Marcia Narine Weldon (19:07)
All right, this didn’t work. Now I’m going to try something else. They do things like, you know, A B testing. They do all kinds of things. They know for a fact that something may not work and they just are ready to iterate and try again. But law students are, this went wrong. This is what the law is as opposed to thinking, okay, but what should the law be? How can I advise differently? What would I do differently? And so that’s where I think some of that comes. So between the desire to be perfect, being taught
about how things are wrong without having enough of an emphasis on what can we do differently, all of that leads to a fear of trying things that are new.
Electra Japonas (19:47)
Yeah, yeah. And I think the last thing the legal profession needs is more perfectionism. Marcia, you’ve written about lawyers needing to partner with AI, and we’ve touched upon AI in kind of various parts of our conversation, but what does that partnership look like in practice in your view? What did you mean when you said that?
Marcia Narine Weldon (19:54)
Exactly.
So you have some, I know some lawyers who don’t even want to spell AI in their law firm because they think it is just a passing fad, know, like NFTs. I don’t know what they’re thinking about it. I don’t know why they think that. ⁓ Huge, and I’ve spoken to people who are in-house lawyers at major corporations that you would know that there’s some AI governance thing over here. There’s some policy over here, but they’re not involved and you know, we’ll see what happens. We’ll see how it shakes out. And as you know, being in the field, things are changing daily.
So when I think about partnering with AI, part of it means getting yourself educated on what it can and cannot do, and specifically how it can and cannot help your clients, and how you can use it like a junior associate. This is a huge existential issue that I deal with because I teach junior associates, people who are going to be junior associates, and I look at law firms saying, why would you use a junior associate when you could use artificial intelligence, right?
In the same way that there are certain things that you wouldn’t ask a first or second year to do without supervising them. You shouldn’t expect AI to do that without supervising it. Not just because of the fear of hallucinations, but because artificial intelligence in some areas has gotten so good that it could look really like a complete answer. And it’s really not. And sometimes you’ll have to iterate and iterate. I’ve seen people come to me, for example, with contracts they’ve done with ChatGPT or something like that. You were busy. I didn’t want to bother you. So I just did this.
And it takes me three hours to fix because it looks really good on the outside. But if you don’t have the underlying knowledge, it’s not going to work. And I think about this in terms of partnering with AI. If you are a senior person or a mid-level person and you’ve had that experience of knowing this is how this really works in practice, AI can be indispensable. If you’re just coming out of law school or you’re first or second year and haven’t had enough of that richness of experience,
you’re going to over-depend on AI. And I think that’s where some of the risk lies. Now, most responsible firms are building in their own large language or small language model. So there’s going to be less of a concern there. I look though at those who aren’t that are just kind of, I’ll just use, know, chat GPT, I’ll get an enterprise version of it, or I’ll do something that hasn’t been trained on legal information and it’s more generic. That’s where I’m worrying more. ⁓ So from a partnership perspective, it’s
using it as a second as a brainstorming tool, using it to think about how can I come up with better deposition questions? How can I, know, let me look at this, this clause and say, if you were the buyer, how would you perceive this clause and what’s likely going to be the biggest objectives, objections. Let’s draft, redraft this law, given the fact that we’re in the pharmaceutical industry. There’s ways you can partner and really have fun being a lawyer again. ⁓ because when I use AI to help with redrafting contracts, I actually have fun with it.
because we’re partnering and we’re thinking. But I think too many lawyers that aren’t doing it that way are thinking about, I used the tool, I didn’t like the output, it’s not ready yet. And as they haven’t really learned how to partner with it.
Electra Japonas (23:20)
Yeah, I agree and this applies across the board, not just in law.
Marcia Narine Weldon (23:26)
Mm-hmm.
Electra Japonas (23:26)
And I think
that there is a real skill to be learned there around how you can iterate with the tools that you have at your disposal to augment your offering or your skill or your output, because it’s not there to just do the job. mean, in some instances, it will just do the job if it’s a basic task. But things that are more complex, like the drafting of a clause or the review of a contract, you do need to apply your own
judgment, as you said earlier, and be able to understand also how the tool may have perceived your instruction and almost get into the, it’s almost, it’s almost using design thinking, the user centricity is now focused on AI.
Marcia Narine Weldon (24:07)
Absolutely.
Electra Japonas (24:12)
So if you can understand how the AI is understanding your instruction or your prompt, as it’s called, you’re much more able to iterate and upgrade your prompt to get a better output. And when you start to have that partnership with AI, it really is indispensable. I can’t imagine.
doing my job slash life without AI now. And it is quite scary how quickly it’s all played and how dependent I am on it. I speak to it loads. ⁓ But yeah, it is it is just incredibly powerful if you know what to do with it.
Marcia Narine Weldon (24:38)
Yes. It’s really scary.
Absolutely. you know, it’s like you talk about the over-dependence. I do worry about that. I’ve seen text messages from my friend, like, did you use AI for that? Because that doesn’t even sound like you. Are you so lazy now that you can’t send me a text message? But then I see this stuff and I’m working on things like, let me just run this through AI. But that’s the question, right? How much of our critical thinking are we outsourcing? ⁓ That’s what I worry about as well. But again, if you’re at a certain level, you can recognize it. When I look at these, you know, college students that
Electra Japonas (25:03)
Yeah.
Marcia Narine Weldon (25:20)
all they’re doing is using, know, chat GPT to write all their essays. They’re not getting those fundamentals and the basics. And that’s the generation that’s coming into law school. And that’s the concern that I have.
Electra Japonas (25:31)
Yeah, yes. And I think that there is a risk of kind of over-correcting with AI to the extent that there is now a lack of that opacity, that vagueness that is life. You know, because when chat GPT or any AI tool spits out an answer, it sounds really plausible and it’s just so well structured that it’s easy to believe. And if you haven’t got the context to kind of dig a little bit deeper and look into it.
Or even if you do have the context, but you’re tired that day and you’re like, that seems good. I’ll just put it in. You know, if you’re not cautious in that, from that perspective, is, there is a risk that you over correct with AI, you remove the ambiguity and now you don’t even have the opportunity to practice those critical skills. So I think there is a huge role for educators in that space to, to kind of articulate that and teach students how to assess it.
Marcia Narine Weldon (26:12)
Thanks.
Yeah.
And that’s another issue, right, in terms of what we need to teach more of, how to be comfortable with ambiguity and the gray spaces. That is very difficult for law students, right, because this is the law. This is right. And even when I was outside counsel, right, this is the law. When I went in-house is when I had to realize that business people live in ambiguity and the gray spaces all the time, because that’s how you get to the next level, right? You have to be willing to deal with the potential uncertainty because otherwise,
you’re not gonna be able to think broadly enough. And that’s another area where I think, you know, being comfortable with ambiguity, I there’s a difference between vagueness and ambiguity, right? And I think, you know, our students don’t necessarily know the difference and are very uncomfortable with both because it’s always, what’s the right answer? I have to be right.
Electra Japonas (27:12)
Yeah,
yeah, yeah. When I went, when I did law, I actually thought that was what it was going to be like. And I quite liked certainty.
And I think lots of lawyers become lawyers because they like certainty. They want certainty of a profession that they know is going to have longevity and prospects. So from a macro perspective, they like certainty. And then on the other hand, they like certainty when it comes to the micro level. So this is the law, this is what it says, and this is what you do.
Marcia Narine Weldon (27:21)
Okay.
Electra Japonas (27:43)
When I got into it, I was like, this is so not black and white. This is so read between the lines and try to come up with if this, then that. And then actually it depends, which is such a classic lawyer phrase. ⁓ But yeah, I think it takes time for them to get their heads around that. And now with an AI, I think there’s just an added layer of complexity there because it might make you feel that now you have got the right answer, but actually, you don’t.
Marcia Narine Weldon (28:08)
Right, and because we’re also in my generation too, instant gratification is what we expect. If I go on Amazon, how could this take two days to get to me? When, you know, I’ve ordered from Instacart, what do you mean it’s not here in three hours? And that’s crazy, right? Or we get on an airplane, like the wifi doesn’t work, but we should be glad that we’re in a plane in a tube going across the sky and we don’t crash into the ocean. But we’ve come to expect things instantly, which means
Electra Japonas (28:16)
Yep.
Marcia Narine Weldon (28:38)
If AI gives us the answer, we’re not so willing to go and say, let me dig a little bit deeper. Like you said, it looks good to me because I’m used to getting things instantly and assuming things instant is correct because somebody has already thought through all of that. But again, it’s the whole potential bias with the garbage in the garbage out. We all know it could look great, but it’s still garbage. just good smell garbage, right?
Electra Japonas (28:58)
Yeah.
Marcia, you’ve worked on whistleblower protections and ethics commissions and ESG frameworks. How should lawyers show up in this in this new landscape?
Marcia Narine Weldon (29:13)
think it depends on where you are, right? So I’m in the United States. ESG is a little bit of a touchy subject right now. But I was in Brazil and they were talking about gender parity and talking about environmental issues and ESG issues. And I just came back from Ghana where corporate governance and the EDS and the G were top of mind. It used to be that the US used to be kind of the world’s ESG and compliance policeman. That’s no longer the case.
⁓ But if you think about kind of what investors, ESG was for investors. Corporate social responsibility was a different kind of animal. ESG is really supposed to be what the investors say they care about. I don’t know that the investors are sure what they care about ⁓ in terms of how to articulate that. And I think you have a lot of people that are dealing with kind of disclosure fatigue, but let’s bring it back to AI. When we think about ESG, it couldn’t be more important.
from the perspective, what are the environmental impacts every time we do a prompt? And I’ve seen Sam Altman saying, please stop saying good morning, how are you? Because this is just taking up some energy, right? But then on the other hand, building huge data centers, right? What’s the impact that that’s going to have, right? On the other hand, AI can solve the climate change problem. So we have to think about it in two different ways, right? Now on the S, the social, what about the huge potential disparities
that artificial intelligence could either widen or close. We talked about the access to justice gap. We talked about the education gap. And on the governance, who decides what’s right from a legal perspective, ⁓ from a cultural perspective? AI governance itself is a huge issue that we need to think about. So as we look at ESG, we’ve got to expand what that means and depoliticize it and focus more on
What does this mean, not just for investors, right? Not just a shareholder centric view, but a stakeholder centric view. We used to have a little bit more of that. And I think at least in the U S we’re moving away from that. And I’m seeing a little bit of that as well ⁓ in the EU in terms of, again, not a lot of harmonization of ESG standards and just kind of disclosure fatigue and what are we doing this for and what is measurably changing now that we’re asking for these metrics? Who are we holding accountable?
Are investors holding companies accountable when they don’t live up to their ESG commitments? Are governments holding people accountable? Are consumers holding companies accountable?
Electra Japonas (31:45)
Yes, yeah. What kind of ethical blind spots are we not considering maybe when it comes to AI in legal practice?
Marcia Narine Weldon (31:56)
think that there’s, you I’ve started using a term called, you know, so this privacy by design, ethics by design. I think we have optical ethics by design. We talk about putting a human in the loop. We talk about putting policies out there, but no one’s really thinking again about those inputs and thinking about AI usage at every step of the way. Who’s getting harmed? Who’s being left out of the conversations? When are we thinking about this? Are we thinking about this after?
you know, a young teenager, unfortunately, you know, dies by suicide because of an AI bot that’s talking to them versus where are lawyers getting involved? And again, lawyers often get involved toward the very end. The business people thought about everything. Now they say to the lawyers, all right, paper the deal, write it up, right? When are lawyers and other legal professionals involved at the very earliest time? And again, when we think about lawyers and ethics,
we’re often thinking about kind of professional ethics, right? That’s what we focus on in law school. But what about the human rights issues, which are ethical issues? It could be labor issues involved, privacy issues involved. So we put up the optics that we’re doing the right thing because we have the lawyers draft the policies. We have the lawyers do the training. But how is that being audited? How is that being monitored? What are the incentives that are being put in place for either using AI or not using AI or how we’re using it?
Who’s asking the questions about how the algorithms have been changed and trained? And who’s saying, we have to stop here, regardless of the potential profit, right? What kind of questions do we ask our clients? If you use this AI tool, which is fantastic, you could cut 90 % of your workforce by doing that. Let’s go for an AI first policy. Business-wise, that might make perfect sense. But what will that mean from an, you know, is it?
It could be legal to do something, but is it ethical? Now, a lot of lawyers say that’s not really my job. My job is to tell them X, Y, Z, but there are ethical obligations that we have to at least ask clients, have you thought about this? And even that, and the client may say, I never thought about it. Or now that I thought about it, I’m still doing the same thing. That’s fine. That’s the client’s decision. But our job can be to help our clients think about.
Electra Japonas (34:02)
Mm-hmm.
Marcia Narine Weldon (34:14)
What are the privacy implications, not just because the EU has some rules or Singapore has some rules, but what does this mean in practice? What kind of human rights issues come in? And then what are the ethical implications of everything we’re doing or not doing? There’s not enough conversation about that. So it’s more of a check the box. All right, we’ve got a human in the loop. We’ve got it, we’re good. And that’s really not enough because people don’t even really know what that means.
Electra Japonas (34:31)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, yeah, it’d be really, it’s going to be really interesting to see how things pan out. ⁓
Yeah, it is a controversial topic talking about the impact of AI. was at a dinner the other night and I mentioned that I think that lots of professions are going to be completely replaced by AI and it was not a popular opinion at all because it is scary to say the world as we know it is about to change and this is not… People compare AI to the internet. I like to compare it to electricity. It’s going to be fundamentally life-changing and I think it will impact
Marcia Narine Weldon (35:11)
yeah.
Electra Japonas (35:18)
things that we just take for granted as pillars of the way that we live in this society, like the economy. I think that will have a fundamental impact the way we perceive the economy. I won’t go into loads of that because that’s the topic for another podcast, but there will be a huge impact because of this. And we do need to be mindful of what that means. And as lawyers, because we have this capability to understand impact at this.
multi contextual level, we do have an ethical obligation to flag that to our businesses when they’re when they’re when they’re when they’re proposing the use of AI for things that might have actually a downward impact later on. So yeah, I’m really interested in seeing what happens. Marcia, you also coach and teach resilience, emotional intelligence and mindset. Why are those skills no longer nice to haves for lawyers?
Marcia Narine Weldon (36:11)
So I have said that these soft skills are the hard skills because remember most lawyers, we’re not unpleasant people, know, bedside manner, client development, client development is clearly important, but not necessarily associate or lawyer development, right? Professional development is often in some firms thought of as that’s, know, that’s that department over there. But I see…
I have seen lawyers that make $400,000 a year, say, I’m out. I feel dead inside. If I have to wake up another day, I’m not going. ⁓ And they feel guilty because they’ll say things like, if I’m not a lawyer, what am I? Who am I? I said, well, wearing is what you do. It’s not who you are. But we’ve tied our identity so much to who we spent all this time.
We became lawyers because somebody told us when we were five, you’re so smart, you argue so well, you should be a lawyer, which is a terrible reason to become a lawyer, right? Or we only become lawyers because we want to help people. Well, you can be a firefighter, you can be a nursery school teacher, you can be a nurse. There’s so many ways. A lot of times we don’t even know why we become lawyers, right? And then we go into a profession where we’re not able in many situations to be creative. We feel like we’ve got to be perfect. We’re afraid to make a mistake.
Many people go into it with a tremendous amount of debt, so you can’t just leave, right? And there’s so many expectations from family and friends. ⁓ Electra is a lawyer. She says, well, you know, think I’d rather actually just be a flower designer instead. At some point, people might say, hmm, I mean, enviously, but they might look at you askance. So when I look at it, it’s, I try to tell people to focus on, you know, what is your personal mission statement and what are your core values? If you have,
Electra Japonas (37:46)
Yes.
Marcia Narine Weldon (37:55)
don’t have those core values, you’re likely to sit there and work yourself to death in a place that doesn’t respect or value you. And as you get older, certain things become more important. The time your health becomes more important than the money. It depends on the stage you are. My students that are graduating, like, that sounds nice, but I just need to make the money. And I get that. That’s why I went to Big Law. But I also went to, I specifically, I was fortunate ⁓ that I had my choice of firms to go to. I picked the firm that had a
very strong pro bono commitment. And that because that was core to me. That’s why for 32 years, I have loved every single job I’ve ever had. Most people don’t have that core of, will be able to walk away from this if I’m not happy. ⁓ So I tell people to think about emotional regulation. I talked to a junior associate the other day, she can’t stand her boss, she wants to stab her in the eye. It’s like, go take a boxing class. I want you to sit there and box.
So that every time you think about stabbing her in the eye, I mean, those were the words she used, she said, I said that I need you to sit there and think about the boxing class you’re have later in the day. How do you build the emotional regulation? You I wake up every morning and I do some breath work. I wake up every morning and I do some tapping, emotional freedom technique. I do meditation mindfulness because I know that later in the day I might be on Zoom for 12 hours, right? And there are days like that. If I don’t have something like that,
I can’t fall back on it. So the same people that, you don’t just wait till your pickleball game on Saturday for you to feel good. Like every single day, you have to find something that can help bring you back, whether it can help you breathe. ⁓ I posted a couple of days ago that I was at a conference and I had a high heart rate notification 17 times. And I was like, my God, I’m about to die and have a heart attack. So now I’ve been back and I’ve been doing all these things this morning. I had low heart rate notifications, right?
And then I was meditating. ⁓ It said, you’ve been asleep for 30 minutes. I’m like, no, I have not been asleep for 30 minutes. I’ve been meditating, but it’s because I have trained myself every day. So when I talk about resilience, right? It means that what’s that storehouse you’re going to get when something comes up, when the unexpected thing happens, when you have to live in the ambiguity, when it’s not perfect. And the partner says, fix this with no other explanation. And you think that is a fate worths in death. Cause if you don’t have those storehouses,
Electra Japonas (39:47)
Bye.
Marcia Narine Weldon (40:17)
to draw from, you’re gonna collapse. You’re gonna go in your office in a puddle and you’re gonna cry. And there’s nothing wrong with that. ⁓ But you have to build it up. now, especially in an age where everything is changing, where no one’s job is certain, right? When, know, we’ve all seen the statistics ⁓ and, you know, it’s not three to five years. I think, you know, the students that are graduating now and the next, they’re already seeing it. Consultants are seeing it.
Electra Japonas (40:27)
Yeah, because it’s not sustainable.
Marcia Narine Weldon (40:44)
the medical profession is seeing it. Everyone is seeing the impact of how AI is changing things. Plus you’ve got geopolitical certainty. So we’ve got to sit there and say, okay, how can I be calm in the face of whatever storm comes? How can I build skills that I’m so good that they cannot ignore me? How can I be that I’ll be that person? When I was in house in 2008 and the financial crisis, said, somebody’s gotta learn this. I’m like, I’ll learn privacy, I’ll learn this.
Electra Japonas (41:05)
Mm-hmm.
Marcia Narine Weldon (41:13)
I’ll go talk to the IT people. I’ll learn about, you know, tabletop exercises. learn about cyber. I want it to be the, I’ll be that person because I want them to say, well, God, if we fire Marcy, we got to three more people to do her job. That’s not a popular way to think right now, but it’s the way we need to be thinking. Right. How can I add AI to my toolkit? What other skills do I need? How can I think about design thinking?
How can I learn about behavioral economics and neuroscience to the extent that it can help me understand human behavior and what motivates people so I can build incentive systems that make sense? All of these are things that I think about and add to my toolkit so that I can be more valuable. And we have to get lawyers and basically anybody who’s listening to think about how they can add value for jobs that are gonna go away to think about jobs that may not even exist yet.
So what are the skills that you need to be able to adapt and pivot in that way?
Electra Japonas (42:06)
I love everything you’ve just said, it’s so true. I think there is this ⁓ toxicity around pushing yourself too hard.
And there’s a conflict that people feel that I think is very unhealthy. It’s like, but I want to push hard because I want to succeed and I want to become indispensable. But I’m also told not to push too hard. And I think that in itself is more stressful than pushing hard. If you want to push hard, push hard, just know your boundaries and know that you’ve overdone it now and now you need a rest and be clear about that. But if you feel that you’re ambitious and you want to chase and you want to work really hard,
Marcia Narine Weldon (42:31)
Yeah.
Electra Japonas (42:44)
I don’t think that that’s inherently wrong. I think the narrative around it is skewed and I think it’s actually really problematic. And I mentor a student and he asked me the other day, is it okay if I work late? I was like, what? Of course it’s okay.
Marcia Narine Weldon (43:01)
You
Electra Japonas (43:03)
because I have other colleagues and friends that tell me that I shouldn’t be working late. So he feels this conflict. And I think that’s not good for someone who is ambitious and wants to push forward. As long as you know your limits, I think it’s unhealthy to do the opposite.
Marcia Narine Weldon (43:21)
That’s the
key, right? What is your core value? If somebody says, I want to be a partner in a major law firm, that has been my life stream. I was like, great, I’m going to because I coach lawyer, I’ll help you get there. Let’s make sure you understand what the sacrifice will be, that you’re comfortable with it, that you have the support of your family. And then again, you’ve built up the mental, physical, emotional, spiritual resilience to do that. We’re going to get you there. But if you say, wow, I didn’t realize it was going to be that much work. Let’s say, fine, then we’ll go someplace else.
But you have to kind of know, and I don’t judge anybody who does that. And again, the reason I do so much stuff in the morning and I get up and walk and watch the sunrise, so this podcast time kind of messed up my whole morning thing, I’m just kidding. ⁓ But it’s because I might work. My mother’s been living with me lately because my father passed, right? And so she’s like, do you ever leave the computer? Like, I think you talk about wellness all the time. like, yeah, I do my wellness for three hours in the morning. And that’s how I can be here.
in flow, because I love what I do. I’m like, it’s 11 o’clock at night. I didn’t even eat dinner yet. And it’s not because I’m a workaholic. It’s because I’m blessed to love what I do so that I don’t even notice the time, which many lawyers would say, I’ve never heard of that concept. Right. And then the second thing is I’ve built up my reserves in the morning, right. So that I can do it. And when people burn out is because they get up, they’re on the computer right away. They work, they don’t go to the bathroom. They don’t drink any water. They don’t, know,
They don’t have any, even a five minute moment of just, let me just be mindful and drink my cup of coffee without doing anything else. They don’t do anything. So that’s how they burn out. Or, and they’re also working in something that does not align with their core values. They don’t have any meaning to what they’re doing. And many lawyers don’t have any meaning to what they’re doing because in law school, we didn’t prepare them for that.
You prepare them for, look at all the fascinating, interesting Supreme Court cases you’re gonna read. And then you’re like, I’m doing document review for the purchase of the shopping mall that I don’t care about. ⁓ But you can’t care about it if you put some meaning to it, right? Look at all the jobs you’re gonna help create. Look at ⁓ the dreams that are gonna come true of the people that are in those places. And if you reframe how you’re thinking about it, then any legal task you do can have some meaning. But we’re not, again, taught to think that way.
Electra Japonas (45:35)
Yeah, wow, love all of that. Marcie, it’s been an absolute pleasure to have you. I feel like that ⁓ hour just went in a flash. ⁓ Absolute pleasure and your students are really lucky to have you in their lives at this stage of their careers.
Marcia Narine Weldon (45:43)
Thank
And
I’m lucky to have them too, because they keep me motivated. They keep me thinking. And AI has been such a real wake-up call to help me think about how am I going to teach differently for a world that these students need to be prepared for? And I feel like a personal responsibility and every educator needs to feel that way. Every partner in a law firm, every business owner needs to think about what is the responsibility we have to this next generation of people coming into the workforce.
to make sure that they are ready and that they can contribute and that there’s a meaning to it as well.
Electra Japonas (46:28)
Yeah,
yeah, that should be part of their ESG agenda. Thank you, Marcia, and thank you everyone for listening and stay tuned for the next episode of Future Contracts. Thanks very much. Take care.
Marcia Narine Weldon (46:33)
and so it was wrapping me.
Thank you.
Thanks.