The New Age of Collaboration and Sharing with Doug Caddell, CIO of Mayer Brown

Technology expert Doug Caddell, CIO at Mayer Brown, talks with host Bill Bice on the new age of collaboration and workflow in the era of hybrid operations: 
  • Thanks to the pandemic, attorneys are taking more initiative with technology, resulting in long-term culture changes.  
  • Doug talks about the move to Teams, not just video, but cross-collaboration with clients. 
  • What does the roadmap look like for a conservative firm to move to the cloud? 
  • Branding IT inside the firm, fostering innovation. 
  • Workplace of the future driven by workflow and collaboration in hybrid operations. 
  • Hybrid is much more challenging than going remote. 
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Bill Bice

CEO | nQ Zebraworks
Recognized as a legal tech industry visionary, receiving Thomson’s innovator of the year award. Founder of ProLaw Software (acquired by Thomson Reuters), West km (used by 70% of the top 1000 law firms worldwide) and Exemplify (acquired by Bloomberg Law).
Doug Caddell

Doug Caddell

CIO | Mayer Brown
Caddell is a veteran CIO, legal industry technologist and internationally recognized speaker and writer on legal technology. He has over 30 years experience in finance, operations and management and in leading the technology efforts of a variety of organizations, including mid-sized and large law firms and a governmental law department. Mr. Caddell has a degree in Management Information Systems (MIS), and also Accounting from the top ranked MIS program at the University of Arizona.

Transcript

Bill Bice: This is Bill Bice. I am here today with Doug Caddell. Doug, it’s good to be with you. 

Doug Caddell: Hi Bill. Good to see you. 

Bill Bice: It’s great to see you again. One of the things that’s really been fun about coming into legal tech, I mean we’ve known each other for a long time, which we’ll get to that piece. 

Bill Bice: Reconnecting with old friends is a big part of the fun here. Despite knowing you for a long time, I don’t really know the story of how you got into legal tech. So, what happened? What’s the scoop? 

Doug Caddell: If I could figure that out, I’d probably have a Ph.D., but I ended up in Arizona after the Navy, where I was a weather forecaster. I ended up after the Navy, I was an air pollution meteorologist for a copper smelter in the middle of Arizona, the middle of nowhere. Nearest movie theater, an hour, and a half away, which was a big change for me. And I ended up finishing my degree in management information systems at the University of Arizona, which actually had the first MIS department in the country and is still one of the top five. And I did an accounting degree because it was easy to combine the two. 

Doug Caddell: So, out of school, I went into the CPA business for a couple of years, two or three years, just to gain some business experience. And then moved over to the technology aspect. And after a number of different job changes and career advancement kinds of things, I ended up at the Arizona Attorney General’s office as in charge of IT there. And I did that for a couple of years, two or three, and then moved to a private law firm. A 120-attorney firm based in Phoenix, which no longer exists and that is where I met you either was at the AG’s office or at the law firm. I can’t remember. This was like the early to mid-’90s, so my memory doesn’t go back that far. 

Doug Caddell: And you were with ProLaw and were the founder of ProLaw and helped us. You sold me ProLaw and came over from Albuquerque which are the balloons in the back. More on that later. And helped us get started on that. And then from there, I ended up doing a little bit of consulting when my wife and I moved to Kansas City. And then I joined Foley & Lardner where I was CIO for 13 years. And during that time, I commuted a little bit to Milwaukee, then down to Chicago. But still commuting from Kansas City or Houston or whatever I was living for my wife’s work. 

Doug Caddell: And then subsequently, did some consulting, including interim CIO at Relativity, which was founded at Foley & Lardner when I was CIO there. And then I have been at Mayer Brown for just a little over five years, but I now live in Colorado and Albuquerque. For everybody, Bill lives across the mountain from me in Albuquerque. We’re sort of back to the Balloon Fiesta atmosphere there. I’ve been doing Mayer Brown for about five years. I’ve been in legal tech for too long to count and I don’t want to count that long. 

Bill Bice: I don’t like counting that long either. 

Doug Caddell: [Laughs] Yeah. 

Bill Bice: But we’ve both been doing this for a while. But that means you have been doing work for anywhere for a lot longer than most.  

Doug Caddell: Yes. I’ve worked in the Chicago area for 19 out of the last 22 years but never lived here on Saturdays or Sundays. Although, I’ve stayed over a few. And we last met each other just, what, two weeks ago or so at an ILTA. ILTACON in Las Vegas, so it was good to see you and others there and see that ILTACON was back. I was reflecting with you just before we started recording that after leaving the ILTA conference this past year, was it worthwhile? And yes, it was. And I’ll look forward to next year as well. 

Doug Caddell: I’ve been going to ILTA since the mid-1990s because it was founded … It used to be the Wang  Legal Users Group, also known as VSLUG. I love that title. And it was Wang Informatics, which was the software division of Wang was in Phoenix and right across the street was the Arizona Biltmore resort. And in the summertime, rates were cheap and so if you wonder why ILTA is in August, because for the first probably 10 or 15 years, it was held in Phoenix in the summertime in August because the room rates were cheap. 

Bill Bice: And they’ve continued that theme. It’s always somewhere hot. 

Doug Caddell: Yeah. 

Bill Bice: I assume it’s for the same reason. 

Doug Caddell: Yeah. 

Bill Bice: I really like how you put it. ILTA was worthwhile and it was also kind of like going back in time to earlier versions of ILTA because it was a smaller group. 

Doug Caddell: Yeah, ILTA back in the old days of the mid-’90s was at the Arizona Biltmore and there were about two, 300 members. And the thing I always remember was at the vendor floor was actually in a large outdoor tent outside. 

Bill Bice: Yeah, I remember that. I remember that well. When we sold ProLaw to West, we announced that at ILTA. That was 20 years ago. It was probably LawNet then. 

Doug Caddell: Probably so. From VSLUG to Law Net and then there was a conflict with a company in the UK as we and ILTA wanted to expand internationally, so that’s why ILTA came about. 

Bill Bice: It’s become such a crucial part of the legal tech industry now. So that history of going to ILTA every year is just a lot of fun. I’m really hoping we get back to … Even though the smaller event was really enjoyable this year, I hope we get to have the full experience next year. 

Doug Caddell: That will obviously be great. It’s sort of interesting though, we think back to Phoenix and how the legal tech community used to be regional and much smaller, whether it be regional within the US or now it’s more international. I had the opportunity to help startup the UK startup of ILTA, so that was cool too. But I was thinking of how it started with us in the Phoenix area and Rick Hellers was in Phoenix, so I met Rick early on. 

Doug Caddell: I know in an earlier iPod cast that you mentioned Ray Zweifelhofer of Worldox and I knew Ray at that other Phoenix law firm I referenced where he was a vendor who helped me start up one of the very first outsourcing of a help desk. And it was actually his cousin, Jeff, who was actually one of the people that outsourced onto the help desk. It’s sort of a small group and then he moved onto Worldox, which is headquartered in Glen Rock, New Jersey. A small town outside of New York City that happens to be my hometown. 

Doug Caddell: I visited him a couple of years ago and went to his building and his building was just an empty lot, empty dirt when I grew up. And he was on the third or fourth floor and I said, “Ray, come over here.” And we looked out the window. “See that gas station? That’s where when I was a little kid I used to blow up my bicycle tires. And the barbershop that my mother used to take me to was right over there.” It’s just bizarre how things come and go. 

Bill Bice: Well, it’s amazing the connections in this industry and so many people that get pulled in kind of by happenstance and then choose to stay because the community is just so great. It’s one of the things I’ve always enjoyed about being in legal tech. Let’s talk a little bit about what kind of challenges you’re tackling at Mayer Brown. What are the things that you worry about or are top of mind these days? 

Doug Caddell: I think a lot of it’s the same whether you’re in a large firm or a small firm and had some of these conversations at ILTACON or whether you’re just in one country or another, it’s keeping people together. How do you keep people together, especially with the pandemic? How do people collaborate? I mean we had those challenges before the pandemic. Now it’s a little bit more challenging and other ways a little bit less challenging. We’re here on a Zoom call and whether you’re using Zoom or Teams or Webex, suddenly in March of 2020, everybody had to learn how to use technology. 

Doug Caddell: Before it was, “Oh, how can I possibly do that? I need white-glove service.” People would go into conference rooms for a video conference, and you would have to have a tech there and stuff. So, that’s going to be something interesting as we do return to the office fully is attorneys now know how to use a Zoom or Webex, so when they come back into a conference room, are they all of a sudden going to forget? And we’re structuring our technology and technology staff to assume that they’re not going to forget and that they can go into a conference room and do a Webex or Zoom. 

Doug Caddell: And another aspect of it is that as we’ve all gotten used to collaborative tools such as this, where previously if a lawyer needed to have a conference with a client or others, a video conference, he or she would have to go down to the conference room and do what I just described. Probably half the time now, a lawyer’s going to say, “Forget it. I’m not going to go down to a conference room. I’ll just do the Webex or Zoom from my desk.” And so that’s going to be an interesting change to see how it evolves. 

Doug Caddell: So, collaboration. There are all sorts of aspects of that part of it, video conferencing and calls, and how this has replaced the telephone, at least within the IT department. We’d have very few conference calls anymore. They’re always Zoom or Teams or something. We’re moving more and more to using Teams. We’ve had an implementation project for that going on for many, many months, but using Teams beyond just the video aspect of it. 

Doug Caddell: I’m trying to do the collaboration including cross-collaboration with clients outside of the firm, which as we all know, a lot of our risk lawyers have concerns about that. But we’re trying to evolve beyond those concerns so that we can use Teams with clients and others to pretty much the full extent that it was designed to be used. So, that’s one thing. 

Doug Caddell: Another is obviously the cloud. My former firm, Foley & Laudner, I brought that firm to a cloud DMS in 2010, a decade ago. 

Bill Bice: Wow. 

Doug Caddell: Mayer Brown has historically been more conservative, but we’re having that talk right now and I think within the next few weeks we will be on our path to move our DMS to the cloud. Along with other things that will then follow because it’s inevitable. As you all know, more and more vendors are going cloud-first at some point in time whether that’s three, four, five years from now. And for some vendors, it’s now it will cloud-only. If we want to be able to provide our lawyers with appropriate tools for their trade, they’re going to be SaaS based or other forms of cloud because that’s where many are already. 

Doug Caddell: And a lot of us used cloud already, whether it’s Chrome River for expenses or this app or that app. I always remember from the time consulting, and I would go out to a firm and talk about cloud, and they would, “Oh, we don’t use the cloud.” Well, yeah, but you’re using this, this. You’ve got your payroll there. You’ve got your personnel stuff there. You’ve got your expenses. You’ve got other things. And it’s like, “Oh, I guess we do use the cloud.” 

Bill Bice: Yeah, there’s a natural progression occurring here, right? Started with really nichey applications, Chrome River, Monday, whatever you are using for HR. That’s in the cloud for almost every firm now. And then you have firms moving to Office 365 and as you say, they don’t even really think about that’s necessarily in the cloud because it’s so accepted. 

Doug Caddell: And then you get hybrid cloud. Like with our Teams implementation, one of the things we moved to hybrid was exchange because if you wanted to schedule meetings in Teams with others, you needed to have a piece of that in the cloud. We’re not running the exchange in the cloud, but we’ve got a hybrid instance. 

Bill Bice: And then the DMS is the next really big chunk that goes and at some point, you see the practice management system, or the billing and accounting system go to the cloud. And then we’ll really have crossed the Rubicon at that point. 

Doug Caddell: Yep. Yeah. Probably another thing is just within our IT departments and the firms, but getting people to work together, breaking down silos of this group within IT versus this group. A lot of times, people talk together but they don’t necessarily communicate. And one thing that I’ve tried to do, I did this at Foley, and I did it here at Mayer Brown is one of the things we can do to create that bond within a department and also sell our products and services to our customers, our lawyers and such, is really to brand IT. 

Doug Caddell: We did that at Foley. And at Mayer Brown, we are doing what we Evolve Mayer Brown Technology, so that’s our brand. And on our emails and such, there will be that little Evolve Mayer Brown Technology logo or brand, so that’s one thing we can do as technology leaders find new ways or find ways to help foster our selling efforts because we sell a service. 

Bill Bice: Yeah, that is such a great way to look at it. It’s natural for me to look at it that way because I’m on the leader’s side. But then for you to do that inside the firm, that makes a lot of sense. 

Doug Caddell: What I’ve always talked about is challenging the status quo. Too many times in whatever organization we’re in, whether it’s law firms or other things, “Well, why are we doing it that way?” “Well, that’s the way we’ve always done it.” “Yeah, but that was 20 years ago,” or 10 years ago, or five years ago. In this realm, that was eons ago pre COVID. But challenging the status quo is something that not only as technology leaders we should do, but we should encourage everyone at every level to do that. 

Doug Caddell: And including those that come in from outside legal tech who are new to law firms and the way law firms operate. And sometimes they come from places where maybe it operated better. So challenging the status quo is a constant not only challenge but battle. 

Bill Bice: Well and I think that’s a great way to capture the silver lining of the pandemic because it has forced a questioning of the status quo. And I think you captured it really well talking about the exposure that attorneys have now to technology directly. That’s a theme I’ve been on for a while and we see it in the changes that firms are making. 

Doug Caddell: One of the things that we talked about is soon after everybody evacuated the offices in March 2020, a little side story there. About two months before, I was headed to our Hong Kong office in the third week in January of 2020 and there was one death in Wuhan. So one death globally and you think about it now. And then a couple of weeks later, the second week in March, I was in London and that’s when we decided to all go to work from home. And we moved our firm totally work from home in 10 days. 

Doug Caddell: It was actually a benefit I was in London because the day started early, so my day was long but it was appropriately long, so that was good. But soon after that, our managing partner started a workplace of the future task force, and it was probably a month or so after COVID blossomed. And there were about a dozen or so of us on it globally. I’m from the technology aspect. And so, we’d been thinking about what’s the workplace of the future will look like? And not just work from home, but what’s the post-COVID workplace look like? 

Doug Caddell: And one of the main things that we talked about there was workflow. And before those conversations started to take place, at the managing partner level, the senior attorney level, nobody was really talking much about workflow. That’s something that you and I have lived in for way too many years, but all of a sudden I started throwing that in the conversation, and about three or four meetings in, it started to make some sense to people that as we come back and as we become post-COVID in how we work, in collaboration, all the things we’ve been talking about, workflow is part of it. 

Doug Caddell: And whether that’s document workflow because you’ve got attorneys at home where no longer is it walk something down to the word processing department or the document services department or copy center, whatever, or have his or her secretary doing that or personal assistant do that. And the same with the type of services that you provide at nQ Zebraworks. Workflow, it’s more top of mind now. 

Doug Caddell: And then the other aspect that fits into that whole workflow question is if you talked to a lawyer three years ago and you talked to them about where their personal assistant needed to sit and he or she would say, “Well, obviously I need my personal assistant right outside my door.” When was the last time a personal assistant was right outside some attorney’s door? Well, not quite two years ago. And so, now those PAs are all over the place. We’ve gone to a remote working workflow process but hasn’t really been workflow. It’s all been helter-skelter.  

Doug Caddell: And some of us have outsourced some of those services to companies that do that, so now instead of the PA being right outside somebody’s office, it’s in some other company station and some other state or the PA is around. And as we come back, we’ll be going to a work from home policy of about up to two days a week that you can work from home. Some jobs aren’t going to fit that, receptionists and copy center and things like that, but that’s not just for attorneys. That’s for staff as well, so we’ve proven over the last 18 months that we can work in a distributed environment that includes secretarial services. So that will continue on. 

Doug Caddell: So this whole idea of how we develop and incorporate good workflow techniques and tools into how we do business from a personal one-on-one standpoint, that along with collaboration is probably the two key things that coming back will unfold. 

Bill Bice: And we really can’t say that it doesn’t work, right? 

Doug Caddell: Yeah, it works. 

Bill Bice: Because we just all experienced it working. 

Doug Caddell: Yeah. One of the comments that I heard in our workplace of the future taskforce was we used to have a work from home policy and it was formulated to discourage work from home. Now, we have a new work from home policy that’s actually made to encourage work from home because it works. 

Bill Bice: And the benefits that you get from that are huge. And I think we’re going to see a real war for talent that if you don’t have that kind of flexibility, it’s going to be tough to get the best talent. 

Doug Caddell: Right now, a lot of people are, “Well, I want to 100% work from home.” And you try to recruit people and it’s like, “Well if you’re not doing 100%, I don’t want it.” I think that will probably blend a little bit, whether it takes six months, 12 months that you have to have flexibility but it doesn’t need to be 100% one way or the other. 

Doug Caddell: I know one of my sons who works in St. Louis for Boeing, he’s been the work from home since March of 2020 in a one-bedroom apartment. And he just started going back to the office a little bit and is really happy to do so. And you get others in high rent areas where maybe a young associate who’s in a one-bedroom apartment like my son and getting out and about from time to time is seen as a real benefit. So it’ll blend over time. 

Bill Bice: Yeah, we’re not ending in extremes. The office has been such a crucial part of how firms have operated for so long. I mean what we’ve seen because we’ve been tracking the data across a number of large firms and what you just described is right down the middle of what we’re seeing. 

Doug Caddell: Yeah. I’ve been coming into the office ever since I commute from out west. So COVID, I commuted Monday through Friday and now it’s a little bit varied and different, but I like to come in and look at my picture of a balloon on the wall instead of actually looking out the window and watching the balloons in the sky. 

Bill Bice: What do you think about the challenges around pushing out new technology and training given this sort of hybrid work environment? 

Doug Caddell: From the training aspect, we haven’t had that much of a challenge. We’ve switched to remote training. Like most firms have started to drift away from everybody who came to a classroom kind of thing years ago. Years ago went to more coaching and things of that nature, but we’ve also done a lot of new hire training, which is for us every two weeks we run that and it’s a two-and-a-half-day process. And that’s all been done remotely and we haven’t missed a beat. 

Doug Caddell: The aspect is a little bit somewhat challenging because as we’ve tried to do, say, some upgrades like certain types of Windows upgrades or machine upgrades, some of them just have not worked well over the wire because they take so long to churn. And when people were coming into the office, say with a laptop, it just happened. So those have proved to be a bit of a challenge, both from a scheduling and getting it done perspective. 

Doug Caddell: One thing that we have gone to with technology and I know some others have done it well as well as a laptop’s first policy. If we look back pre COVID, it’s maybe a 50/50, laptop desktop. A lot of attorneys and some others had laptops because they moved around. Secretarial stations and other workstations that didn’t need to be mobile had desktop computers. And the one challenge that we’ve found in going work from home when COVID hit was not everybody had a good piece of technology, a good computer to be able to work from home. 

Doug Caddell: So a year ago, we started going to a laptop’s first policy where everyone gets a laptop unless it’s like a receptionist station and things like that because that enables people to pick up and go. And it also helps facilitate the work from the home process. We can’t say we have a work from a home policy where you can work up to two days from home and then you don’t have a computer that you can work from home. So that’s one of the big changes that have come about from this, laptops and docking stations. 

Bill Bice: Yeah. Do you see any other aftereffects coming? I mean what I have seen in talking to firms day in, day out is that getting back to the office and being hybrid has actually been more challenging than the initial move to going remote. 

Doug Caddell: Yeah, as I said we went firm-wide globally and half our firm is outside the US in a week to 10 days. It was just so easy to pick up and go. But coming back is much more challenging, even if it’s a situation from a hardware point of view. You’re finding machines that haven’t been turned on in two years and then having them churn or download all the Outlook to it. 

Doug Caddell: And then, to be honest, a lot of people have concerns and there are those that we talked about like my son who was really excited to come back into the office a little bit because he’s been trapped in this box. And he only moved to St. Louis like a year before, so he didn’t have a good friend community except at the gym. I don’t do that. But a lot of people have concerns about coming back in. Like a lot of firms, we continuously see return-to-office dates being shifted a little bit. And part of that is geography for us. 

Doug Caddell: In Asia, like Hong Kong, they’ve been in the office pretty much the whole time. And a lot of it is culture. A lot of it is they live in small apartments like we were talking about. In UK and London is mostly like us in the US. They’re still trying to get back, although we’re coming back there. And it’s different. So technologically, it was the challenges of collaboration tools, getting more tools in place like Microsoft Teams where we have a big push. 

Doug Caddell: And then also, as we talked about earlier, how are attorneys going to use technology in the office? Whether it’s video conferencing, are they going to just say, “I want to do it from my desk in my office?” Or, “I want to come down to a conference room.” And then if they come down to a conference room, we happen to use Webex primarily now, but whether it’s Webex or Zoom, whatever they’ve been using at home, all of a sudden that they forget how to push the button. And it’s like, “No, we’ve adjusted our staffing prior to you so that you really need to learn or read.” Keep understanding how to push the button because you can set it up so it’s almost that easy to do. 

Bill Bice: Yeah. I wouldn’t wish the pandemic on anyone, but I do think it’s moved us forward as an industry and taking things that would’ve taken 10 or could’ve taken 20 years to get there. 

Doug Caddell: Yeah. I mean you look at from when I first went to DMS cloud to now, it’s been a decade. So it’s easy to think in decades. You think about workflow that we’ve talked about, that would’ve been five years out for a lot of firms, maybe 10 years out, if that because if you go back five or 10 years, everybody had an assistant who ran things around for them and staffing levels have changed. The world has changed. 

Bill Bice: Yeah and the acceleration of the digital transformation is really key to this because once everything is digital, your ability to work in new ways, opens up possibilities that just didn’t exist before. 

Doug Caddell: And it’s even like iPads. I mean I’ve been an iPad guy since 2010 when it first came out. When I first got here to Mayer Brown, it was sort of funny because the new CIOs’s coming and so they give the new CIO the latest and great laptop computer and all the good stuff. And so it was a really good laptop computer, nice and lite and everything and I tried to use it for two weeks and I gave it back because I said it was too heavy because I travel a lot. 

Doug Caddell: I’d be standing on airplane lines to board and with this, I could just do that. And when I’m ready to go, I close it up and slap it in my bag. And the laptop was a clamshell, so even when I travel internationally, I just travel with an iPad. I can do 90% of what I want to do on it. The other 10%, I punt. But just the whole change in technology as we go along. 

Doug Caddell: And one thing that’s in front of me now is I have a good … I’m operating on a desktop computer because when I traded in the laptop, I said, “Just give me a desktop because when I go mobile, I do use my iPad.” But I’ve got a good quality camera up here. I’ve got a light, halo light up here so I get some good lighting because the lighting in my office is actually behind me. 

Doug Caddell: So that’s one of the things that we’re facilitating as well as when people come back, making sure that they’re not dealing with the camera on their laptop, which is down here or no lighting so they’re in this dark tunnel. So that’s another change that you talk about digitalization and how we communicate and how we present ourselves. A whole thing that we’ve learned or many of us learned, not all of us, as we’ve used these concepts of video tools from home is how to present ourselves. Do you have the cat on your shoulder kind of thing and stuff. And I could be using an alternative screen, but I figured I’d show you my office and the balloons. 

Bill Bice: Yeah. And many of us missed the in-person interaction, but I think there’s a real benefit too because now it’s not the phone call, as you mentioned. It’s the video conference. And you get a deeper connection much more quickly starting with a video conference. As opposed to doing a whole series of calls to then eventually meet in person. 

Doug Caddell: Yeah, that’s true too. 

Bill Bice: One of the things that really causes all of this change to stick is because we’ve seen one of the most profitable years for law firms ever. And so you can’t make the argument it didn’t work or that it doesn’t make sense financially. And therefore, it’s going to stick and some level of that is going to be demanded from clients because yeah, we were actually very successful doing it just over Zoom. And we do want to see you once in a while, but maybe not as often. 

Doug Caddell: Yep. Yeah, I would concur. 

Bill Bice: I think this is a great time to be in legal tech because so much is happening. There’s a ton of appreciation for what legal tech has done for the industry. 

Doug Caddell: It’s always a great time to be in legal tech. Having gone through a number of different stages and steps like you have, it’s not been a challenge and it’s never not been an opportunity to make progress. And that’s what’s happened over the course of my career. I can remember when at the Arizona AG’s office, we were on a Wang VS system, and then we moved to, as Rick mentioned on another podcast. The first PCs I bought there were Wang branded PCs. And then we moved into using computers and PCs. 

Doug Caddell: And I can remember my first law firm, one of the senior partners there, as much as I tried to talk to him … well actually two of them didn’t want a PC. It was, “It was a secretary’s tool,” because secretaries used it for word processing. And one other lawyer didn’t want it, a senior person. And then one day, he called me and wanted a PC and it was because one of his major clients had wanted him to connect to their system and so all of a sudden he had a client need, so he did it. 

Doug Caddell: But the other person, he couldn’t understand why he was talking with other lawyers who were using it and this email thing. I mean all he got out of the email thing was every day he got a thick printout of paper from his secretary, and he couldn’t understand. Well, the secretary printed out every email that was sent to him. And one day, he wanted a PC and it was amazing. I talked to my boss. “Bob wants a PC.” 

Doug Caddell: So I ran right up there because I didn’t want to miss the opportunity and I had talked to Bob. He wanted a PC, so I said, “I’ll send a tech up with a PC.” Tech went up and the tech said, “Where do you want it? Often it’s in the back credenza.” But, “No. Put it right here on my desk.” “Well, there’s now power stuff there. I’ll have to deal with …” “That’s fine. Just put it on my desk right here now.” And the next day, Bob called up and said, “Take the PC out.” 

Doug Caddell: And what we found out was he wanted the PC which he thought was a secretary’s tool so therefore he didn’t want one. He wanted the PC on his desk that afternoon because he had a client come in and he wanted to be seen as progressive. Once the client left, it was like, “Take this thing off my desk.” So we look at how we’ve progressed through things and it’s been an interesting or fun time. 

Bill Bice: Yeah. So we have made progress. That’s the good news out of that story. It’s hard to imagine an attorney who would not want a computer at his desk. 

Doug Caddell: Yeah and no matter what you’re trying to do, peer pressure helps. 

Bill Bice: Yeah. It absolutely does. Well, Doug, this has been a lot of fun. It’s been great catching up with you and learning from all your experience. 

Doug Caddell: Oh, vice versa. And vice versa. It’s been a great ride. Like we were just describing, sometimes a little bit of a roller coaster. I don’t think we’ve either seen any big crashing dips on a roller coaster that we’ve gone, “Oh my god, no.” But it’s been a fun ride and will continue to be that. And challenging as we talked about as we work to come back to the office because it’s going to take some work to do. 

Bill Bice: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Doug. 

Doug Caddell: All right, bye-bye. 

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