How to Build a Legal Knowledge Base With AI: Jimmy Toy

Jimmy Toy0:00
I kind of turned the oh no, we're gonna get replaced mindset on its head and say, replace me. How can I be replaced.

Cecilia Ziniti0:11
Welcome back to CZ and Friends, where we talk with legal leaders, technologists, and operators shaping how modern companies work. I'm your host, Cecilia Ziniti. Today's guest is Jimmy Toy, Chief Legal Officer at Articore Group. Articore owns Redbubble and T Public, two of the biggest online marketplaces for independent artists in the world. 70 million plus user-generated images on those platforms. Jimmy is the lawyer. Jimmy and his team are the lawyers responsible for all of it. Jimmy's been using AI and ML in his legal work for over 10 years before Modern LLMs, which is a small group, self-included. Jimmy has some takes on where legal is going, where legal is getting AI wrong, where legal is getting AI right. And it's gonna be a potentially uncomfortable conversation for some of you, depending on where you sit on the copyright spectrum. But it'll be good, uncomfortable. So let's get into it. Jimmy, welcome to the show.

Jimmy Toy1:06
Thrilled to join, talk about my experiences. Awesome.

Cecilia Ziniti1:10
Let's start with something you wrote to us before this episode that has really caught my fancy. So you said the best lawyers five years from now aren't going to be using AI to work faster. Instead, they're gonna not be using they're gonna be using AI to not do legal work at all. Lawyers and the teams that they lead will shift from authoring individual outputs to just reviewing them and being architects. That's consistent with what I see. It's what we see on the software engineering side. My co-founder recently said, hey, I don't write code anymore. I just oversee it. Is that where legal is going and unpack that for us?

Jimmy Toy1:48
Yeah. Yeah, I definitely think so. Because I think software engineering has really led this sort of a transformation within their industry. And lawyers in the legal industry, I think we need to head there too. But I think we have a very unique resistance to that sort of a transformation because we are uh just because of the way we're trained and the way that we think. But yes, I think we'll either have to change or we'll get be left behind. I I think being replaced is the fear of everyone, but I think we need to embrace that and figure out how we can get replaced in the right way.

Cecilia Ziniti2:24
Aaron Powell Mention a unique fear that lawyers have. And I want I want to push on that. I'm not sure it's unique, but what what what do you think makes your lawyers uniquely averse to AI if they are I can speak for myself.

Jimmy Toy2:37
I think in a lot of ways I represent a typical lawyer because I want to have flawless judgment and I want to work hard and show that I'm spending a lot of time working on this output. Uh I mean, maybe not if you're at a firm, maybe not too much, not too little, uh just the right amount. And then you really become risk-averse. And you know, you have this notion that exercising your independent judgment is is key, and that judgment needs to be flawless, and you need to put in the time and effort of backing it up. But with with these new tools that we have, it's you know, it's really changing that because it's not I think you still need to exercise your independent judgment and you still need to be right most of the time, but things are moving so fast, and you can rely on AI, I think, to to fill in some of those repetitive parts of what we do, like information gathering. Just you can rely on it for that and then focus on maybe the higher level judgment. But I think it's hard to let go because as a lawyer, you feel like you're responsible for everything, every output, every every response. I think it does make it harder to embrace a new tool that is new and risky and uncertain, but has such potential, I think, to transform the way we do our work.

Cecilia Ziniti3:59
You said

Cecilia Ziniti4:00
part of that aversion of that feeling of responsibility is trained. How? Like, is it just literally going to law school? Is it we've been burned too many times? Like I I want to get into like the psychology a little bit because I think it's it's it's a it's a powerful concept if you want to move past it, is like, okay, I understand what why it's the case. Yeah.

Jimmy Toy4:22
Well, I think a great example is the billable hour. I I think I'm I'm speaking not only to in-house lawyers, which which I have been for most of my career legal career, uh, but also those at firms, because I mean you look at the billable hour, uh, take this as an example. You know, what if you spent a thousand hours doing something and you had this really great work product? Uh and the the thousand hours you spent on it was a it was like a big deal. Uh it was great, uh it's the right amount of time. You didn't spend too much time, too little time. So let's just compress that and say, what if you could what if you instead of spending that thousand hours re- uh achieving that same output, you could have spent five hours or even zero hours? It's you know, you I think in the end, you aren't measured by you know the amount of hours that you spent on it. You're measured by the output and how correct it was and how timely it was and the way you communicated it. But it it's hard to separate that from the billable hour because how how do you do you just give a client a bill that is 90% less hours than you normally would have spent on that task?

Cecilia Ziniti5:30
Trevor Burrus And so you you made the transition in-house, you said relatively early in your career. What is different about that incentive in-house, if at all? Because I mean I think for me, like I agree with you that there's this like work ethic, kind of pride of authorship, of like, you know, we've been through law school, you know, if you clerked, like whatever, whatever it is that you did, you build a ton of hours at the firm. It's like this like kind of dossier that you have where you're like, you know, yes, I've I've done all those things, and most people haven't, and we're this rarefied breed. But in-house, I I feel like I shed that, that like just the pure hours-based pride. Did you?

Jimmy Toy6:10
Yeah, for sure. Valued more on the timeliness of my advice and the work product documents I produce, much more so than yeah, the amount of time I spent on it. I think there is one aspect of this that I that applies to in-house probably more so than firms. So I think at if you're a lawyer at a firm, you know, you got this billable hours thing, and how do you fit AI tools into that? But if you're in-house, you know, you also you want to build the trust with your with with your fellow executives and and cross-functionally across teams. Um you want to show that you're the person that they can come to that has the answers. Yeah, how do you uh how do you deal with uh AI in the middle of that? Uh do you do you tell them I I used AI for this? Uh are you proud of that or or do you do you not make it very prominent in in the response that you're giving to them? So I think that there is a little bit of a uh uh conflict there because when I'm answering a question, I'm gonna feel like this is my judgment. You're the only you can only come to me. But actually, they could have gone to the the LOM and asked and probably gotten 80 percent of the answer that I gave them.

Cecilia Ziniti7:26
So what lives in that 20%? Any good stories? Um you've been using AI for a long time, different platforms, so and and what are the things, what does legal look like going forward?

Jimmy Toy7:38
Aaron Powell So I think that LLMs will have the most powerful transformative effect on the legal profession if we try to not just do things faster, but try to do things totally differently. And I think the differently, you know, that's pretty generic, broad thing to say, but I think one way lawyers can really look at it and apply this new awesome tool in a way that is gonna have a real positive effect on like the their business that they're advising and the outcomes that they drive is just thinking about what you don't have to do. I I kind of had this, I kind of turned the oh no, we're gonna get replaced mindset on its head and say, replace me. How can I be replaced? And what are things I don't like to do, things that the LOM could do, or something that we can use the AI tool to empower someone else to do. That could be somebody on your own legal team, it could be a paralegal, it could be uh a more junior lawyer, it could also just be somebody on the people and culture team, just uh like interacting with, say, a legal chat bot or something. And and I think the way you get there is by identifying what you do repeatedly, what you don't want to do, what somebody else or some tool can do, and then kind of separating those things out and then trying to build a system around it. You know, the you know, the system can be something that's you know involves a lot of the different tools and communications tools and LM tools that you have at your disposal, say as an in-house lawyer, and then um and then building workflows, building policies and uh escalation, uh how are things escalated, measuring the effectiveness of it, um, and then capturing all of that and then iterating and continuously improving that system.

Cecilia Ziniti9:24
So

Cecilia Ziniti9:25
let's bring it um to your companies. Uh Red Bubble and T Public are marketplaces. Artists upload designs, customers buy them on products, 70 million images, that's bigger than almost any uh marketplace. And so you create this platform for creative work. And basically your legal exposure ends up being relatively high, right? So obviously you have DMCA, but you're printing t-shirts, you're printing all kinds of things where if your users upload things that are have the IP issues, you've got to not only police it, but you've got to have the consequences around that. So curious, like on copyright. So are you a copyright maximalist? And how does that view or how does the company's view on copyright show up for your team? And then we'll talk about AI within that, but first let's start there.

Jimmy Toy10:17
Yeah. Uh so a little background on Articore Group is that so we we own three digital platforms. Two of them are marketplaces. One's a creator storefront called Dashery that we newly launched. Uh, we also announced recently that we are acquiring an Indian pronoun domain marketplace for the Indian market. And uh, so that'll make four digital platforms that we have. All of them are user-generated content catered to creators of graphic content that are trying to sell products like t-shirts and stickers and merch with their with their brand or their or their art on it. And then because I'm a lawyer, I have to clarify one thing. We actually don't print anything, Cecilia.

Cecilia Ziniti10:58
When we used to talk about IP, it's like so I I used to work on Amazon Alexa and they this is public, but the name for the Echo device was changed from Dash to Echo so late they had already printed the boxes. And so literally tossed the boxes, shipped Echo in a just like literally cardboard box. And it was brilliant because the users were like, wow, this is so stealth, you know, this is this incredible, like secretive invite-only thing. But it turned out it was just that it was too late to print the boxes. So it's true that IP is harder when you're dealing with physical goods. So do you use like a third-party printer, or how do you go from being a marketplace to to the the we had different participants in the marketplace?

Jimmy Toy11:41
We have the creators who are selling the products and uploading the content and creating their art, their customers uh who purchase from them, and then third-party fulfillers. They're usually mom and pop uh printers who are located close to markets all around the country, around the globe. Um, because all of our marketplaces are global. And so they're a huge community of fulfillers that participate on our marketplace, and they're the ones that do the printing. They aren't our employees. We don't have any equipment, they're just participants, fellow users.

Cecilia Ziniti12:10
Interesting. Okay, yeah. So I I I like to I dabbled photography. My mom had stone a shutterfly calendar for every year for however long. And um, you know, I did notice recently I went to go print something in Walgreens, and it did have a copyright, an explicit opt-in copyright said I own these images, et cetera. So is that is that the legal framework you're you're using? And I'm a former IP lawyer, so relatively deep on this, have pretty big views on open AI and copyright, which we'll talk about. But what what's the how do you how do you all do it?

Jimmy Toy12:42
Yeah. And so that's a very standard way to kind of build compliance with the law, you know, when you're on a user-generated, when you run a user-generated content platform. So we have tens of thousands of uploads a day to our to our platforms. Uh you can't possibly monitor it all. So yeah, you have to rely on people that are uploading that and selling the their products to attest that they to represent that they own the uh that the IP and that they aren't infringing anyone's rights. They're complying with the user agreement. But yeah, it's a it's a huge area of risk for any platform, whether you're your social media or your more like graphic art platform, hosting that sort of thing, or you know, all the way to being like an e-commerce marketplace, it has its own special specific risks. And and I never uh I never did litigation when I was at a firm. Um I ne joined Redbubble to become a just become the just a j a generalist and do corporate law. We'd never Redbubble had never been sued at that time. And then and it was called Redbubble before Articore. So uh when we started acquiring companies, we changed our name to Articore Group, became a group of companies. Now that I've uh within the within six months or so of joining uh the we were sued. Um and then we now fast forward almost 12 years that I've been here, uh I think we've had maybe 40

Jimmy Toy14:10
or 50 IP cases around the world.

Cecilia Ziniti14:13
Wow.

Jimmy Toy14:14
Yeah, and I've been the one kind of leading the management.

Cecilia Ziniti14:18
That's what it sounds like.

Jimmy Toy14:19
I did, yeah. Uh although I don't know anything about filing or formatting court documents. That's all totally foreign to me. But yeah, like the strategic side of it, the reviewing briefs and um doing a lot of e-discovery, like all of that, I had to learn.

Cecilia Ziniti14:36
Does any one case stand out that you're most proud of?

Jimmy Toy14:40
You know, I like to say we win most of them, but we don't win them all. And I think that's actually very important observation for risk management. I think if we won all of them hand down, knocked it out of the ballpark, we might be managing risk with too heavy a hand. But I think the ones I'm most proud of. So it I I think I think one in Australia I'm very proud of. Um Hells Angels sued us for trademark instructions. I like to say I testified against the Hells Angels in federal court. But uh but you know, it was it was a trademark suit. Like somebody had uploaded their logos, and you know, and rightfully so, they're very protective of you can wear a you know a jacket or a vest or a t-shirt with their logo on it. Uh would try our best to really keep that stuff from coming on the site. And very little of it did, but the you know, there would be a couple of things that would get through our screens. And Australia didn't have a law, a safe harbor law to protect platforms uh around for uploading of trademark content. So they had one for copyright, similar to the DMCA in the United States, but there really wasn't any settled law around what to do if somebody uploads a trademark that infringes someone's rights. And there's nothing to protect the platforms. So we actually lost our our first round and then but you know uh this case went on 10 years, and then we just in the last couple of years won on appeal. And I'm very proud of it because it actually created law in Australia, yeah, similar to what the United States has, where if uh modeled around just notice and takedown and you know how a sort of responsibility does a platform have for this user-generated content. And so now it very much mirrors uh what a lot of other um countries around the world, you know, whether it's on the EU, India, United States, and so but yeah, it was our our cases that helped to bring that about, which helped all platforms operating in Australia.

Cecilia Ziniti16:37
Wow. So put us in the room, let's say seven years in or whatever you're when you're deciding whether to appeal. What are you presenting to the team to make that decision?

Jimmy Toy16:49
Um a lot of balancing. So yeah, of course, you weigh the costs, uh likelihood of winning, disruption to the business. Um, as a as the lawyer of managing these cases, you you know, you want to appeal and you want to win, you know, if you don't think it's the right outcome. Uh but you know, you have to kind of take the greater business in in into uh consideration. Um in the case of this one, it was, you know, it really wasn't there there wasn't much of a I think this is true of a lot of appeals. You know, if you lose, there's really not much downside to appealing. And you can uh yeah, I I think maybe you could use it as leverage to force a settlement, or yeah, I think there's a lot of different ways to look at it. And usually on balance, it's for important an important case, it usually makes sense to appeal. And so it's kind of our default.

Cecilia Ziniti17:39
Yeah. It it so back to the kind of AI theme, you know, it is it I have this, well, I would say that being a litigator at a law firm, which I was more so first, and then as you know, in-house lawyer, and then now as a CEO. It does change my tolerance for it. So I gotta say, seven years into a 10-year litigation, I'm not sure how receptive I would be, but I guess in that in that framework, like to back to our question about AI, could AI have queued it up as you did? Because you kind of said, okay, here's the balancing, here's the whatever. And you're saying, okay, replace it. Like, is that the kind of decision, like that most crucial decision? We had a a litigator on the show um a bit ago, Michael Jacobs, who was a former chair of Morse and Forster. And he said deciding to bring litigation is like deciding to open up a business unit, was how much he thought that that was a decision, because it really was, it has to be managed, it has to be staffed, it has to be paid for, uh, and it has to be have the strategic decisions that you described. You know, but you're a defendant, right? So a little bit different. But curious if you would agree with him that really is fundamentally a business judgment. And even if it is, how that interacts with AI that you described of making yourself obsolete.

Jimmy Toy18:54
First of all, we just have an amazing in-house team. All of us, I would say that we became a crack litigation in-house team over the last 10 years, um, uh, you know, across so many jurisdictions, uh so many countries, Europe, Asia, United States, Australia, and then in the external council that we use have been excellent as well across all our cases and jurisdictions. And then I think that uh it's so time consuming, especially the e-discovery part. We've done class actions, and when things get in the class action area, it can become very, very time consuming and disruptive for the business. It can be very broad discovery. Uh you know, you have to bring in if you don't have a system in place, like an e-discovery system, and you haven't been through it before, you know, you just need to reach out to the CTO to ask them, is this how this part of the platform works? And they have to think about it. It takes time out of their day. Uh, they might need to get deposed. Um, and then you know, how do you deal with that? You know, they've never done that before. And it yeah, across all the teams, starting with legal and then extending out uh in if you're an inner company, especially extending out to like the product and engineering teams, marketing, even finance, yeah, it becomes an all-encompassing thing that everybody is working on together. It is like the launch of a of a new business line

Jimmy Toy20:15
or something.

Cecilia Ziniti20:15
How have you you said your your team became a crack team of litigators, you're encouraging AI, you're telling people to embrace the new. How do you do it? And how do you find and hire people that are willing to to make change and to be open to new things, challenge the status quo? Because I I I think if lawyers are are kind of afraid of AI, the the meta point would be more or or a meta point that I might see there is that it's more just like they've had this great career, you know, they're making good money. There's kind of like not a reason to do things in a different way. And so how do you suss that out, the kind of psychology of it, and how do you encourage and grow it in your team?

Jimmy Toy21:03
I think it's a push. You know, even if you're not a lawyer but you work in the legal profession, I think those sort of same sorts of um ideas and training, you know, you get exposed to it too, and that shapes the way you act and the way you think. Uh there's one example uh we uh have on my team. We have an AI champion. Um she's our our legal ops manager. Uh so I one of the things I told her, which kind of got her out of her comfort zone, was every week I want you to uh walk me through a tool that you created, like an AI tool. And I don't just mean a prompt that you know just that's nice, it generates a good output. Like I'm I'm talking about something that people can use to self help, or you can use to self help that's built on our knowledge base. Say going back to the litigation example, one thing that was very time consuming and very, very hard to do. Was like bringing a new so let's say you get sued in a new jurisdiction. Well, you want to maintain consistency with the arguments that you've made, you know, the way you described your business. And so, you know, we would have to go back through just hundreds of litigation documents that we filed to try to find that one little passage where we may have described something or made an argument a certain way that we thought was really good. And we want to like pass that on to this new council, get them up to speed, spending as little money as possible doing that. Before AI, you had to needle on a haystack.

Cecilia Ziniti22:34
Yeah. And I even think I I I think back to pre-AI, the thing that's jumping out at me was uh Meta about maybe five or ten years ago posted a job role in legal. And they called it this title was crazy. You can look we can look it up and print the shows or something, but they called it the VP of existing obligations. I was like, That's literally like going through and looking, of course, you know, Meta had the FTC consent decree. I'm sure they had a lot of state AGs that they were dealing with, hundreds of things globally. So you can literally imagine like what have we promised to what regulator? And this person was a VP. They hired somebody and they failed within six months, which is like, you know, kind of sad, but you know, predictable. But you can imagine, like, okay, at Amazon, there was another case where Amazon was arguing for purposes of going after an employee for their trade secret that the handbook was not a contract. And then in a case, literally like three months later, argued that the handbook was a contract for purposes of the person violating it. So very clear conflict to your point. So have you solved that problem? Does AI solve this problem?

Jimmy Toy23:46
Yeah. Um one of the things that we've been doing is building uh a knowledge base around like all of our court filings that we've done. So they can be like affidavits, declarations, uh even deposition transcripts. That's the greatest thing about this. Like you would never look at a deposition transcript for something or or look for um uh you know, you you may just focus on your briefs, like the big the big briefs that you file, but here you can really put it all in and create this excellent knowledge base that's comprehensive, and then you can just interact with it like it's uh like a person. And so like we have built put all of these court filings in and into these just like into a a Google Drive folder, really. And then um you can also, of course, like some AI tools will have a like a projects folder. You can also put them in there. There's a lot of different ways to do it, but you can totally leverage this extensive, decades-long, multi-decades-long knowledge base and get the answers that you want and that you need without having somebody go and search through all of that stuff.

Cecilia Ziniti24:59
So it sounds like it like when that tool works well, what you're getting is a better result, right? Because presumably, in my example, Amazon is not, you know, saying one thing in one court, another thing in another. And then of course, what are the litigants in both cases gonna do? Take the other position. How does that improve your outcomes? Like, do you do you have any s any specific examples or like is this work that previously your team would have just said, you know, don't mess around, don't, don't look for this because it's gonna take forever. But I remember in that one case, blah, blah, blah. You know, like it is it additive? Like, oh, that's what I'm getting at is like I think what you said is like it's not just saving time. In this case, it's better outcome. Have you seen that specifically yet?

Jimmy Toy25:43
Yeah. Yeah. So a lot of what you're just describing would fall onto me because you know, I am the only one that really had the knowledge of what we said in a certain case in France and how that might apply to an argument that we're making in in India. Um I think it goes back to that idea of not of trying to figure out what do I not need to be doing anymore and trying to build a system around that. So it would fall on me to try to make sure everything was consistent, and then I might spend three hours trying to figure that out and maybe not come at c come to an actual answer on it. But now I can just not even do that. And it's I think it's important it needs to be done because you don't want to get in a situation where you're contradicting yourself. But I don't have to do it anymore because I can just farm it out to the AI tool. And then and of course you go back and check, you know, you make sure that's actually what it's saying is true in the actual documents, but you never would have been able to locate those and find the exact passages without that sort of help.

Cecilia Ziniti26:46
So it's funny you say that because I think one of the original vision um for GC AI was actually that the G, in this case you, um, in Amazon's case, David Zapolski, you know, in the various jobs I've had. David Zapolski's been at Amazon for 25 years, seen the company through, you know, antitrust, labor unemployment issues, expansion of the company's, you know, market cap to almost a trillion dollars, like all these things. And is one of the top 10 highest paid execs in the building, added tremendous value. And you think part of it is that institutional understanding of what is Amazon's risk approach. And so I'm like, if AI can do that, then it's like an AI GC. Now, obviously, you still need, you still need him, but that's kind of where where I think this is going. Do you see the same?

Jimmy Toy27:44
Yeah, I I envision a legal function, maybe uh sure as short as five years in the future, where say where you were the only one that could do something, or you were the only one that had the answers and you're the GC. Being able to decentralize that to people in your team. And I think we always have this sort of uh, you know, this idea of delegation and self-help. Yeah, I don't think those are new things. But the being we have this tool now that we can use that's very, very beneficial to our profession, legal, and to actually bring that about, to really delegate things that only you could do, delegate that to other people on your team, and then and then create these self-help tools for people on other teams to um, you know, to just kind of replace you as the person they had to ask before and wait because you're a bottleneck and you're expensive. Um, you know, gives them an alternative. It's a lot cheaper for the company and a lot faster.

Cecilia Ziniti28:40
What um is something that surprised you about this job or your tenure at Red Bubble?

Jimmy Toy28:48
I think how important relationships are. I think I'm I'm very lucky because I like getting to know people and building relationships. I I get a warm feeling when I when I feel like I can trust somebody and they trust me. And so I I really thrive on that. And um I don't think I really realized how much I enjoyed that and the importance I placed on it until I had the job that I have now. And I look back on the relationships that I've built over the years, all the people that have come and gone and come and gone again, you know, like CEOs and CFOs, I've been here a long time and seen many of them come and go. But building that relationship and trust with each of them and and then seeing how that translates into a really great legal product for the company. Yeah, that's probably been the most surprising for me, and things I've enjoyed the most.

Cecilia Ziniti29:47
Has your um CEO or board or shareholders noticed that? Legal as a product and a good one?

Jimmy Toy29:54
I think so. Yeah.

Cecilia Ziniti29:57
Any good stories there?

Jimmy Toy29:59
Um Yeah, I mean, we like you know, the litigation, I think people have the board has been pretty happy with the way that you know we've managed that risk and manage all that litigation. Um, like reorganizing from uh like restructuring our company from what started out as Red Bubble, you know, just one this one marketplace into a parent company that uh owns a group of companies that that I think was required some special skills. And uh yeah, I think people have been pretty happy with the way that all that has progressed. And you know, now we're in a in an M ⁇ A phase, I think, in turnaround too. We want to try to get our stock price up and grow. And uh yeah, that's our next

Jimmy Toy30:40
that's our current challenge that we're trying to overcome. And I think we're on track to do that.

Cecilia Ziniti30:44
Aaron Powell In your time at Redbubble, you had kind of uh an up and a down, and it sounds like a turnaround now. What's different about being a turnaround, do you see?

Jimmy Toy30:53
Um I think you need to be very cost conscious in a way that uh you don't need to be when your company is growing 30 percent year over year, doubling every year, you know, in a hot area where there's a bunch of money uh being being uh flowing in. Um being a cost center, you know, you're not you're not generating revenue, uh you're not helping to create profit directly. So cost becomes a real uh a real pressure. And so you wanna you wanna have the mindset of so so what we have uh on our team, we have three values that all of us try to live by. And it's uh it's light touch, no surprises, and make every dollar count. We actually had that before. We were in a turnaround situation, but um you know uh really we keep trying to add things to those that list of three, uh, but we keep going back to actually that list of three is pretty much everything, everything kind of goes back to it. And so we've really stuck with that over the years. And in a in a turnaround, I think what is so important is the is the make every dollar count for the for the legal function because you can't have you can have a direct impact on opex, which does impact profits. It's hard to make your business grow uh just from the legal function. Of course, it's that's impossible. You can't do that. You can make it not grow, uh, which would be bad, but you do have a direct impact on on OpEx and and spend.

Cecilia Ziniti32:25
So light touch, make every dollar count, and what was the third one? Sorry.

Jimmy Toy32:29
Uh no surprises.

Cecilia Ziniti32:30
No surprises. I love that. Okay. So literally like print this on a on a on a on a put it on a post-it and and and learn it. So no surprises, that's a good one. Ever been burned on that one or where did it come from?

Jimmy Toy32:43
Yeah. Yeah, it's like what you don't want as a boy, as a as a member of the board of directors to be surprised by something. You want to make sure that, especially in the risk management area, that I'm not responsible for all the risks. I can't control all of them. But what I can do is make sure that because we're responsible for the risk management function, that the board is informed and they can ask the questions that they need to ask. So that really gets to the no surprises thing. Yeah, I don't think we've been burned on anything there. These values have really always been a part of our our DNA. I think it's more of just a fear of it happening. Yeah. So it's it's good.

Cecilia Ziniti33:16
I mean, it it definitely is like, you know, it it it's I think for me, we've had as as GC AI has grown, you know, I had a a bad day. Uh it happens, but I had a bad day last quarter where for about, let's say, half the day, um, I thought we didn't have insurance. Like I thought something had not been submitted. It was like one of these is just like, oh God. And we, you know, we ended up calling, you know, the broker, and it turned out it was something with uh ironically, their online portal wasn't showing the coverage, even though we had it.

Jimmy Toy33:46
Yeah.

Cecilia Ziniti33:47
But something similar happened, not on insurance more recently. And my my faith, I was like, you know what? Um, I'm sure it's fine. I'm sure we actually have whatever it is. And it turned out that we did. And so it was one of these, like, you know, it was very like a zen moment for me. But the difference between those two times was actually that the first time we didn't have a GC and now we do. And so um actually that was a nice, that was a nice, nice realization given what we do here at GC AI. All right, that was fun.

Cecilia Ziniti34:16
So let's do the lightning round. So anything that you would tell your early career self about succeeding as a GC or just about life.

Jimmy Toy34:27
I think don't be afraid of imperfection. Don't be afraid of making mistakes, especially me as a junior lawyer. Emphasize the output more than the amount of time you're spending on it. Uh and then the third thing I think is maybe a little more abstract, but very relevant to what we're talking about here is always try to rely on a system and build a system and continuously improve your system. It makes decision making so much easier and consistent. Uh, you know, it makes you less likely to leave things out. You know, I think it really does and it makes it so much less stressful because you're not, you don't feel like you're starting from scratch every time. You're kind of reverting back to this framework that has worked before that you're just uh executing.

Cecilia Ziniti35:09
I love it. What's a book, concept, or podcast that has shaped how you think?

Jimmy Toy35:15
I I'm big into sci-fi. I really like that, but I will choose a non-sci-fi book. What's really shaped me as a lawyer and an executive and manager and leader is this book by uh Peter Drucker. I think everyone's heard of the effective executive. It's just one of the classics of of management. I has so many insights. It's it's the executive the effective executive in action. It's a it's a workbook that accompanies that book. And Peter Drucker wrote it also, but it's it's like a kid's workbook that you would like fill out in kindergarten, but you're an extra executive like actually writing out, like fill in the blanks and doing exercises from it. And it's just it forces you to apply these things to your actual life and career. And uh so that's had a huge impact on me. I still actually do exercises from it to this day. It's been years.

Cecilia Ziniti36:10
Love that favorite thing about being a lawyer?

Jimmy Toy36:13
I think the the relationships. I I wish I could say I would always know the answers to things and like off the top of my head and be able to like help friends out with advice, or when the CEO asked me, or the chair of the board asked me, or CMO, whoever, I yeah, it's yeah, the answers and and I'm right. Um uh I never really achieved that. And I don't I think it's impossible. Yeah, just being relied on and trusted and being able to help them and help the company. That's yeah, I think that's the greatest thing.

Cecilia Ziniti36:47
Anything else that um you want our listeners to know about you or parting advice?

Jimmy Toy36:54
No, just uh let's embrace this new technology and make our lives easier and let's make our make our companies perform better, and I think we can we can do that by just kind of re-examining the way that we do our work and and how we think about it and what where we place our value.

Cecilia Ziniti37:13
I love it. Awesome. Jimmy, this is a great this is fun to catch up. I'm so glad you came on.

Jimmy Toy37:18
Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it.

Cecilia Ziniti37:20
That was Jimmy Toy, Chief Legal Officer at Articore Group, the company behind Redbubble and T Public. If you want to see how legal teams are using AI to do better work and move to the future, Jimmy describes, head over to gc.ai. Follow CZ and Friends wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks, and we'll see you next time.