Will AI Fuel the Rise of Independent Lawyers? - Kenzo Onumonu - S10E38

Legally Speaking Podcast

Kenzo Onumonu discusses the structural shift in the legal industry toward fractional and independent roles enabled by AI and remote work. He

Key takeaways

• Kenzo Onumonu founded Correm to provide back-end infrastructure and AI tools for independent lawyers.
• The 'verification tax' refers to the time lawyers must spend checking probabilistic outputs from LLMs like ChatGPT or Claude.

Main topics

• Fractional Law
• AI in Legal Tech

Notable quotes

You're now responsible for your own trajectory.

Conclusion

The episode highlights a transformative era where technology enables l

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Stage matters, but I think the thing that matters even more is an understanding of your legal roadmap. A fractional lawyer is not just coming in to do a task and leave, they're coming in to own a function and be the responsible person for that function. It's not the same as going to an external firm, it's somebody that owns the entire process, owns the relationship and is accountable, which means it's taken off the incumbent's plate. Somebody is doing a lot of legal themselves. either using general purpose AI or it's taking up too much of their time and it's not their job and it's not their expertise. That's where a fractional lawyer would be really good to come in. If you're using a quorum lawyer after a month, you'll see a data picture of exactly where they're working and exactly where that work is coming from within your business. That will inform you as to what sort of legal you need. Speaker 2 (0:51) On today's Legally Speaking podcast sponsored by Clio, I'm delighted to be joined by Kenzo Onomonu. Kenzo is the founder of Corum, a platform connecting experienced lawyers with scaling companies seeking senior legal expertise on a flexible basis. Kenzo trained at Bird & Bird before moving in-house. He gained experience working with high-growth businesses and developing a broader perspective on how legal support can best serve growing organizations. From his experience in private practice and in-house roles, Kenzo founded Coram to address two challenges within the legal market, providing independent lawyers with infrastructure for success and enabling businesses to access senior legal expertise. Today we'll discuss the growing number of lawyers choosing independent careers, the changing needs of scaling businesses and the perspective on the future of legal Speaker 1 (1:39) services. So a very big warm welcome to the show Kenzo. Lovely to be here and thank you for having me on. Speaker 2 (1:46) Ah, it's an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. And before we dive into Speaker 1 (1:50) all the great work you're doing, a couple of quickfire icebreaker questions for you. Speaker 2 (1:54) Firstly, what's your favourite beverage and what's your preferred choice of footwear on a typical workday? Speaker 1 (1:59) Oh, preferred beverage. I'm probably going to sound super boring here, but it's probably just kind of like water and electrolytes on a normal day. If I'm out, a rum. Yeah, but just... typical water whatever's in my uh in my stanley yeah Speaker 2 (2:19) um as i'm sipping my water now um but where on a typical Speaker 1 (2:22) work Speaker 2 (2:22) day what would you go for so Speaker 1 (2:23) i work from home a lot and um yeah so it would be some sort of flip-flop birkenstock combo sometimes one on each foot it depends that sort of thing Speaker 2 (2:36) Like it. Okay. And then one piece of technology, legal tech or everyday technology you now rely on, you would have thought unthinkable at the start of your career. Speaker 1 (2:44) I'm going to go for, it's a toss up between Granola, which I think is just so underrated and Calendly. So I actually love the story of Calendly. So a Nigerian founder, I'm Nigerian as well, called Topi Awatana. He bootstrapped that business and knocked on every investor door and kind of no one wanted to fundraise. And then COVID happened. Everybody needs to go remote and, you know, his business exploded. So I love that story and I love his product. So I'll probably just say Calendly pips it. Speaker 2 (3:20) I love that. I love that story. And yeah, not to segue too much, but my Italian mother-in-law was born in Joss and yeah, Oka and Starblogger and all of that. We could have a real conversation. Oh, wow. Yeah, absolutely. But I think we should talk about your journey. So could you talk us through the journey from training at Bird and Bird to your in-house experience, including Deliveroo, and then ultimately founding your own business? Speaker 1 (3:43) Yeah, absolutely. So I paralegaled at Travers first in the corporate private equity team. That's when I kind of, I guess, found corporate law and realized, look, I quite like this. And then when I trained at Bird and Bird, I only did three seats because I'd done quite a bit of paralegal work at Travers. And the second seat I did was corporate. And, you know, before I ended up leaving the seat, I got introduced to venture capital and realized that's where I wanted to be. Then I qualified into corporate venture capital and ended up doing kind of lots of transactions from early stage to more mature companies. And oddly, kind of worked in the food tech. space on fundraisings for food tech founders. So we did some stuff with Just Eat. We did some stuff with a company called Spoon Guru back in the day. And then one of my colleagues left to go to Bumble and she had been interviewing that guru. And she said, look, like these guys are looking. Would you be interested in chatting to them? I thought, why not have a chat and went to see their offices and meet the team. And yeah, I actually applied for a corporate role. And they went with someone who was slightly more senior, who's now kind of a really good friend and an investor in Quorum. And they sort of had a commercial role in the team. And I was about two years qualified and I thought, why not? I can learn something new and I'm sure I'll be able to do some corporate work. So then joined Deliveroo and wow, like what a fast paced environment to work in. I'm sure you've heard. The great thing about Deliveroo was everything you were working on was novel. So it was like, okay, cool. We're opening the offices in Kuwait. I haven't really had this sort of service before. And it was just like, great. And the pace was amazing. And I worked for a really great boss, a lady called Chantal Zember. And she was very much kind of like, as a lawyer, you should be ambitious about your practice and the different verticals that you can kind of get involved in. So although I started commercial, I ended up in the corporate team anyway. I was looking after IP. I was doing options, incentives. So I got a real breadth of work. And then after a few years. I decided to join entrepreneurs first and that was nothing against Deliveroo but I remember leaving Bird and Bird and their partner saying you're now responsible for your own trajectory and what they were really saying was if you want to build a practice it might be that you have to kind of move to get different experiences and that's what I've done. I've kind of gone to different companies to get different experiences. And at Entrepreneurs First, it was very much working with their cohorts and doing early stage fundraisings and also kind of day-to-day commercial legal work as well. But that was a lot of travel going to different offices, opening up a site in India, opening up a site in Canada. So that was... It's still today probably one of the most electric places I've ever worked and yeah, what they're doing is wicked. From there I went on to be a legal director at Weezy and then general counsel at Modern Milkman. So kind of a full spectrum and you know, lots of different legal verticals and lots of different legal experiences. Speaker 2 (7:12) Some fascinating experiences as well, which I want to talk to. But just that piece of advice that that partner at Bird & Bird said, you know, I say a lot on the show about if it's meant to be, it's up to me, you know, taking that self-accountability. And you absolutely ran with that. And hence where you've got to today and with all of these experiences with anyone's careers your skill stacking your network stacking your relationship capital stacking you know all of them it's propelling you forwards isn't it in terms of giving you these tools and experiences which makes you just a more rounded individual for your uh for your areas of expertise so on that then private practice and in-house you've had some really good experiences both How did your perspective on the role of a lawyer change when you moved from businesses? And when did you learn about the type of legal support businesses really value? Speaker 1 (7:57) It became evident that the role of the lawyer kind of needed to be multifaceted. That's super obvious at Deliveroo. I remember kind of being on a project before and not knowing. you know, what I was doing in terms of we've never done this before. But you always, from a legal perspective, will know more than the business knows. So your job is to kind of decipher, calm down and be rational and give kind of reasonable legal advice. So you kind of have to be a jack of all trades in-house. When I figured out kind of precisely what, you know, I believe lots of corporates need from their legal function was when I started leading legal teams and when I started working fractionally. That's when you sit really close to the decision makers and you're setting legal strategy, you're looking after legal budgets and you're looking after the legal function in its entirety. You quickly come to realise a few things that you may not have known when you're a junior lawyer kind of going through the motions in terms of legal's place in the business, in terms of how legal can insert itself at top of funnel so that it can be a really great business partner. when things get, you know, hairy or when decisions need to be made. Speaker 2 (9:19) And one thing you touched on a moment ago was sort of the nature of being independent and going out there on your own. So is there an increase or there is an increase we're seeing in experienced lawyers moving away from traditional law firms to more in-house careers and other ventures? What do you think is driving that shift? And are flexibility, autonomy factors? in the change between the private practice and in-house the real driving factors for that? I Speaker 1 (9:45) think the underpinning factor was probably Covid. The big unlock was you can completely be as efficient working at home. Once you have that as an anchor, then the question becomes, well, actually, can you work for multiple different businesses at home? And can you work from anywhere if you can work at home? And that's kind of like a flexibility unlock for lots of lawyers. And I think a lot of lawyers are realizing now that kind of with AI as a superpower, they can leverage their experience in ways that probably weren't possible before. So the why now question is a multiple of things. AI has given lawyers the ability to operate like this and get closer to kind of what a firm would produce, a boutique's firm. Legal teams are shrinking generally, right? So having been a GC working with CFOs, one thing every GC will have to do is kind of justify spend. Typically, you go to a CFO and say, hey, we're really busy. Look, we need