Recently, we welcomed a new member to the growing team at Ivo. John Lee, our General Counsel, brings over 17 years of corporate legal experience to the team. His career ranges from time in BigLaw, to working in-house at Alphabet’s venture arm CapitalG, and now a more hands-on role at a legal tech startup. I had the pleasure of sitting down with John to learn more about him and his thoughts on the impact of AI on the corporate legal landscape.
You have an extensive legal background, tell us a bit about yourself from a professional perspective. Why did you become a lawyer?
I've always been curious and interested in learning how things work - growing up the son of an engineer, I remember taking apart a lot of things with my father and helping him fix things, both simple and complex, and being infatuated by how everything worked. Law sets out the parameters of how institutions and people interact and function together in society. So, to me, law is an extension of learning how things work, except with fewer random parts left behind after you're done.
As General Counsel at Ivo, what are your responsibilities and how does it differ from your roles in the past?
In my role at Ivo, I'm not just Ivo's in-house legal counsel, but I'm also deeply involved with developing and improving our product and being a sounding board, lawyer to lawyer, for our customers on their experience and getting their feedback. Also, as a first time General Counsel of a venture-backed tech company, there's been a lot of getting up to speed (and asking for tips from my GC friends!). So it's been a lot of learning at the moment - even more so since I've recently made the switch to a Mac after using Windows computers for most of my career!
What led you to Ivo and why did you decide to make the jump?
I've always been fascinated by emerging technologies and, obviously, generative AI is perhaps the most important new technology of all. However, like a lot of people, I felt that most of the AI tools currently out there seemed fun, but were short on substance, with the only exception to this being AI coding tools. I truly believe that AI could be a tremendous help for lawyers and from my conversations with a lot of folks in the AI field, I personally think that it's one of the few real value-add use cases for AI that actually makes sense right now. The first time I saw Ivo in action and spoke with our CEO Min-Kyu, I realized how practical and useful the product was - it's basically what I think most lawyers wished AI already did for them. So I knew that I had to get involved, and taking the leap to join was easy.
Do you see the corporate legal landscape changing in the near term because of AI? If so, how and when?
I think the corporate legal landscape is already changing because of AI, specifically through Ivo and the various other tools out there. However, there's a lot of talk about how AI will replace lawyers and that doesn't seem likely to me anytime soon. AI can be a powerful tool for lawyers, but the best legal analysis requires a lot of additional context and understanding and complex legal issues rarely have simple yes or no answers. So I think that you'll always need a strong lawyer somewhere in the process to evaluate things. However, AI can really be a force multiplier for that lawyer, and for legal teams in general, by helping them review data and make legal analysis faster, more efficient, and with more accuracy than ever. That only becomes more important as in-house legal teams deal with more complex deals and issues and are asked to do more with less in an increasingly complex corporate environment.
How do you think solutions like Ivo fit into this shift? How does Ivo specifically help accelerate this?
I might be biased, but I tend to think that, as companies and users continue to figure out how to best use AI, only the AI solutions like Ivo, that can demonstrate strong value-add to high value tasks and workflows, will endure. Ivo addresses a very specific task that's important to nearly all organizations in a high-impact way by providing tangible time, efficiency, perhaps even more important, the accuracy and performance, of legal teams. As corporations decide how to invest in AI to help their organizations, I think they'll increasingly focus on the solutions that provide strong ROI, like Ivo, to deploy their limited resources.
What are the longer term effects of AI in the legal space?
AI will help empower the in-house lawyer by providing them with the ability to do more and do more at a high level. In-house lawyers are usually asked to be generalists, but the legal field has moved to become increasingly specialized. I think AI will help address this contradiction by helping in-house counsel handle those specialized or complex tasks with greater ease. Longer term, I think AI will help provide a greater ability for more companies and people to get higher quality legal services, as it'll help lawyers do more and at a higher level - the flow-down effect of this is that it'll help elevate what lawyers can do for their clients and also allow lawyers to expand their capabilities.
Who is John Lee, the father and husband? What’s a day in your life like?
Not surprisingly, my days are often pretty busy, though most of that is by choice. In what'd probably be a shock to anyone I went to college with, I'm very much a morning person, who tends to be up by 5 or 6am. I'll usually do a bit of work or catch up on current events before getting ready for the day and helping my wife get the kids ready for school. Once I'm in the office, it's usually non-stop until it's time to go home. Weekends are busy in a different way - my family isn't big on just sitting around at home, so we'll usually be out during the day exploring the Bay Area (well, with the exception of my middle-school age son, who usually just wants to stay home and play video games). I'm always looking for good recommendations for new places to go!
Stay tuned for more exciting interviews in our Legal Tech Champions series. Make sure you subscribe to Ivo Insider for the latest news and updates from our blog!
