Shippable Futures, Escaping Microsoft Word, and Prototyping Your Career with Baru Obračajová

Welcome to Studying Law Around the World. I'm Claudio Claus. In each episode, I talk with lawyers, law students, and professors from different parts of the world to talk about legal education, careers, and what the profession looks like in real life. We talk about the hard parts, the surprises, and the decisions that shaped their paths. Whether you're planning to study abroad, thinking about working in another legal system, or just curious about how law works around the world, this podcast is for you. Today, I have the opportunity to speak with Baru Obrachajová. Thank you so much for making the time to come to the podcast. Baru is a Czech lawyer. She's a legal designer and educator and a futures thinker. Based in Prague, she has spent more than a decade working across legal practice, innovation, and technology, and has previously led project management and transformational work at Dentons across Europe. She now works through Attorney@Code advising law firms, startups, and other organizations on legal design, AI, and service transformation. She also teaches Modern Lawyers course at Charles University. In this conversation, we'll discuss the legal futures, AI-native law firms, legal education, and why lawyers should not only try to predict the future, but also shape it. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. And to get started, I'd love for you to tell us a little bit more about yourself. I'm very much a multidisciplinary legal professional because I do hold degrees from both law and design. I have a programming background, and in my work, I very much fusion a whole bunch of different fields together in order to create a very unique blend that brings law into the 21st century and helps us innovate it. That's amazing. You know, how did your career develop from studying law to working in this international field with transactions, legal design? Did that desire to work in this show up from the beginning? Tell me a little bit more about your story on that. I was classically trained as a lawyer. I was admitted to practice law in my jurisdiction. But maybe I always knew that I had a little proclivity for processes, for setting standards, for making things a little bit more efficient, a little bit better. Even in my law firm work, I would always organize our knowledge bank and hold trainings for others and create little apps with no-code tools and everything. In many ways, it's always been there. But then when I started practicing, I fully leaned into more organizing the legal work and becoming a legal project manager, which was a very fortuitous time in my career where my practice was expanding. There was a lot of work going also abroad. There was a lot of coordination that was required, and I was very much happy to rise up to the task. Being a very voracious learner, I ended up taking a Google project management course and learning project management on the side while I was practicing law. And then taking this project management knowledge and applying it to everything that I was doing back at the law firm. And those, that has worked quite well also because that has allowed me to work a little bit more on cross-border things, to maybe take my legal career a little bit beyond like the traditional practice of law as we know it and to expand it. And then I ended up adding more and more layers to it because once I started leaning more into project management, I was thinking about how to make things more and more efficient. And that has brought me to coding, and coding has brought me to design, and design has brought me to futures. In every single stage of my now about more than a decade-long career, I've always looked around and thought about what would be the most interesting thing that I could do with my time and with my energy, and what is something different that I can bring to the practice of law to make it better, more efficient, more fun. And that's what brought me here to be in where I'm right now. That's incredible. I love that. But I know that you describe yourself as an attorney at code, and I'd love to hear more about, you know, that title, what that means to you, and when did you first realize that the traditional practice alone did not fully capture the kind of work you wanted to do? Attorney at code is for me a very clear multidisciplinarity signal because in legal practice, you're very often told, or at least I was told very often, that you need to become this hyper-specialized professional. That goes really deep on something. There's kinds of lawyers that I greatly admire that can cite the case file names and that they can talk about one specific part of law for hours and hours. But for me, I was always very interested in a broad range of things. To navigate this whole process of becoming a hyper— from a hyper-specialized lawyer to somebody who would allow themselves to be a little bit more generalist. Would be something that then crystallized into the name Attorney@Code, which brings both of my passions together. But coding itself, there was actually a moment when I was thinking that I've been working a lot and that I could use a hobby or as an intellectual practice outside of law. And I'm a language learner, I spent my whole life learning languages, and I was always intrigued by the idea of learning a programming language. I know it's not the same thing, but thinking of how this would change my brain. I think it was on Reddit that I discovered on some random forum that I could take this free Harvard class, which is called CS50, on the internet, watch lectures and start learning to code. And this has been, without any exaggeration, a complete pivoting point in my entire existence because it really has influenced me in 3 key ways. One of them would be how the things can be done that Suddenly when I realized that I can automate things or that I don't have to be copy pasting the same information across different documents, but I could actually write code to do it for me. There was the automation part. Then there was the second thing that it gave me this agency because throughout the course I built up an entire working iOS app with custom design. And this was before GPTs. I wrote all the code by hand. And then third, it also gave me the grasp of what a good learning experience could look like. By following this one little instinct that was always somehow there, this has led me to an incredibly large rabbit hole that then created Aternate Code when I started honoring both of these parts of my personality and of my background. That's beautiful. Before moving fully into legal innovation, you worked on major M&A, energy, and ESG transactions across several regions of the world. How did that international work shape the way you think and see legal services now? I have worked throughout dozens of jurisdictions, and I would say that the main thing to do a good job in that capacity is to honor how every jurisdiction differs, and then at the same time, to try to build a coherent narrative. When you look around, there are so many different jurisdictional specifics, how things are spoken about, how things are presented, how things are signed, what the legal system does, what are the specifics, what are the things to watch out for? And those are very unique in every part of the world that you will go to. But then at the same time, when you are working on a matter, you have to think about that you have one client, that you have one audience that you need to present a coherent story for that needs to be working for their context, for their needs, and for what They need to be really doing with that. I think that in many ways for me, it was very much this combination of going very wide and getting all of the inputs and honoring everything that comes my way that in that sense, but then also being able to then land everything and put it into a coherent service that would be designed end to end in a way that it works for that one particular point of contact that It's amazing. I've noticed now in this interview that you've used the word honor a few times. I truly love that. As a podcast geared towards young lawyers who are learning about what kind of work they want to do throughout their careers, I think it's a really interesting part of a journey, and I love what you had said, figuring out what makes sense for you and the kind of practice that you want to work for. but also being a plural professional, right? Not being only a professional that is hyper-specialized. And a few people feel really good about just becoming a specialist, but I think many of us wonder, you know, can we ever be successful if we do honor all of those multidisciplinary parts of who we are and active across multiple work streams? You know, the products, the teaching, the future. How do those tie together for you? In many ways, I I think that law is right now having this moment when, back to your honoring point, that it's going through this transformation when they're realizing that legal work is not just producing text and not just giving you the end material that can be in whatever shape or form and letting a lot more of the perspectives in. Now with the AI transformation, with the entire discussion around innovation, we're thinking about how can we look at things from more 360 perspective and bring more holistic understanding of what a legal services is and how can we do the best job possible with technology, with the human capital, with the potential that we have. And in many ways, my practice is very much these kinds of puzzle pieces that are together creating a very similar 360 picture. Because obviously with teaching and with building products, those are qualitatively very different endeavors. That have very different deliverables and very different contexts. But then at the same time, every single piece of what you bring to the table then informs the other. If I have to learn as a teacher how to get a point across and how to explain a very complex idea to a student, that's basically the same thing that I'm going to be doing as a product manager or as a product designer, getting the point across, right? That it's the same act of storytelling. And this very much applies to all sorts of transferable skills. Whereas if we look around and try to pinpoint what are the different disciplines that we can put together in order to create this very complex picture of things, that can really bring us to a brand new level of doing the work and of doing the things. And that has been very much my own personal experience with doing a lot of different moving pieces as well. Fantastic. Well, I really appreciate you making the time to share this with us. I wanted to ask, tell me more about the Modern Lawyers class. I see it's about innovation, design, and tech. Can, can we hear a little bit about this class you're teaching? Absolutely. Modern Lawyers is an elective that I have been teaching for 8 semesters now at the Charles University at the Faculty of Law. And very often I joke that I teach innovation to lawyers, which is the biggest, most amazing privilege that I've ever been given. The class revolves around 2 main pieces. One of them is that we're talking about the main trends that are right now happening in the legal profession. Now we have AI. Even before AI, we could be talking about things like legal design, legal tech, legal product management, legal project management, et cetera, et cetera. And then on the other hand, the students develop their own final projects, which can be basically any solution that addresses legal problem. These projects can range from making a brochure as information on legal rights for patients in hospitals, all the way to a vibe-coded platform that streamlines the communication between a lawyer and their client, all the way to a game that teaches people their rights through a very playful and gamified experience. This is a very experimental space. where we take law and we work with it as a material, like how painters use oil paint. We take law and then stretch it in all sorts of different directions in order to see exactly that 360 view. Amazing. That sounds very exciting and sounds like a lot of people would love to go back to law school to discuss these things. What are some of the things that are done differently in your class, if I may ask? I started teaching in September. 22, and then in November 2022, ChatGPT came out or was publicly launched, which means that the class has completely transformed with basically every single semester. But some of the pieces stay throughout the entire run of it. One of them is that we have a lot of mentors from practice, that this is not just a class that would be contained to a classroom, but we have a lot of students. To illustrate it, I had a team that was working on consumer law protection app, and in order to get them a mentor, I cold-called a consumer law hotline and asked them if they could help me find a lawyer or a legal specialist on this who would come and mentor this team. And we ended up having the head of legal for this consumer law association come and mentor my students. First of all, they're practitioners, which bring a lot of different perspective. The second thing is also that we build a lot. We build all the time. This is something where we're always having this bias towards action and making prototypes and making things and then taking those things and showing them to people in the wild. That means that my students test their solutions with their users. They, we invite people to give them feedback. They give feedback to one another, but there's always this act of building that very much transpires the entire semester. And then the third thing is that the students are very much participating on the design of the class as well. I do collect a lot of data. I do collect a lot of feedback. The students set their own educational goals. They get to shape their experience saying, I want to try out project management. I'm going to be leading my team for my final project, or I want to try legal engineering. I'm going to be taking care of the technical specs of it. And that also means that they're helping me in designing of the class as well, that We sometimes meet between the semesters and discuss like all the different ideas that we could be doing as well. This is not just my thing. This is something that we are shaping together with the students in a very co-creative and participatory process. I love that. Tell me about, you know, this concept of futures of legal education. Is legal futures work different from simply making predictions about what law might look like in the future? I think that this is such a fascinating discussion as well. especially to have at a law school, because I guess that it must be a very challenging point of time to be entering the legal profession that a lot of people are thinking, oh, what did I sign up for? And that there are less and less junior jobs and some law firms are announcing that they're cutting junior jobs in favor of AI and so on. For me and in Legal Futures in general, there is always this concept that there's not just one future necessarily, that there would be one thing that would have to happen, like junior legal jobs are going to disappear, period. Not necessarily. There is always different variants that we can shape, that we can work with, and that we can also design. About a year ago or a year and a half ago, I threw this workshop at my law school where I invited students and faculty and people from practice and PhD students, and We sat down in a room and spent about 3 hours discussing how should legal education change in case that we accept it for real and for true, regardless of what we think about it, that AI would replace all the junior lawyer jobs. And what would that mean for the legal profession? What would that mean for the legal education? What else do we need to teach people in order to prepare them for this future? Is there something that we can do in order to shape the future, which would be maybe even better than what we have now. And this ended up being such a fascinating discussion around that. And this goes again back to the agency piece that we can shape our own reality, that we can lead this dialogue and that we can be discussing how these things can be designed in a way that would work. It's not necessarily that we would be saying like, oh, we think that this is 100% going to happen or Satan's prediction. But it's very much about creating your own reality and being ready for whatever happens. I'd love to, to hear a little bit more about that. You know, what does that look like? Legal project management for me represents thinking about the end-to-end of your legal services, meaning that very often as lawyers, we operate in a way that we get an email from a client or from a partner that we're working for. And we read the question or the contents of the email, prepare an email back or a document or a set of documents and send them back. And that's it. Well, with legal product management, it's very much thinking about the end-to-end experience around it. We're starting with onboarding the client, with deciding on pricing, with bringing the client in, with getting all of the information that we need to be having with briefing the team that will be working around it so that they have a very holistic understanding of what is going on. And then thinking about the products that we're presenting to the client, regardless of whether we're talking about making them a contract or using an app for self-service in their legal needs, or if we're using AI to do pieces of the work and so on. But thinking about it from the very start to the very finish, all the way to closing the thing and asking for the feedback. And this is where law, in my opinion, can very much borrow from yet another discipline from project management. Because once you accept that what you're creating is a product that might have some sub-deliverables, but needs to have this coherent story behind it, you can track different metrics, you can focus on What are the different touchpoints? How the client is being communicated with? How is technology included in it all? And how this whole picture can be designed and shaped. That's beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. I also heard another idea. It starts as shippable futures. And I love that name, meaning the ideas that are commercially viable, technically possible, and accepted by stakeholders. So when we put this inside a law firm or in the legal context? What might, you know, lawyers, legal technology companies miss when they focus on ideas that can be launched immediately? First of all, when we were talking about legal education, I mentioned that there's always a plurality of different future scenarios that can happen. And shippable futures basically represent a small segment of that, and there could be a lot of other more disruptive ideas that we can bring to our legal product. Now, innovation in law firms is very often vendor-driven. There would be different providers of legal technology coming to different law firms and pitching them and proposing that they use their technology, which is great and is definitely a part of the ecosystem. But there's also the question of going a little bit outside of the box and venturing out a little bit and looking into the more speculative pieces of how could this be working. If I'm taking a look at not the day-to-day thing, the things that I would ship to the client or the things that I would present to the clients, but taking some step back and think about, okay, what if the client wouldn't have to do anything? What if we had a perfectly visceral experience? What if we had physical product that would accompany our app or something like that. And going maybe into some of the, I would say, wilder ways of thinking about how services and products can be delivered, not necessarily because you would need to create something viable out of it, but because that can give you this R&D angle where you can learn so much more about a problem by bringing something slightly more outlandish than necessarily only focusing on the day-to-day delivering, like, Let's get it in and get everything completed. Typical futures for me are when you're playing it safe and you're going for the things that are very much expected by the markets. But then think about how many times in the history of technology there were completely unexpected things that would maybe feel very outlandish a couple of years ago, but then would completely change the future of humanity. We're thinking iPhones, we're thinking ChatGPT and everything else. Those moments are born from going outside of what is safe and what is shippable. Love that. And that leads us right into something that I read that you wrote. I thought that was a very interesting, thought-provoking piece, which is that a lot of legal technology products are all, are designed around Microsoft Word. So we all know, it's no secret that lawyers live inside their inbox, the mailbox, and Microsoft Word. I loved what you said about, you know, the outlandish ideas. Is it maybe a lack of imagination in how legal work could be redesigned, in fact? Totally. And I also love the whole thing that working outside of Microsoft Word is the outlandish idea in legal tech, right? That's 15 out of 10, right? What else are we leaving on the table when we focus on whatever is shippable? Obviously, Microsoft Word is the lowest common denominator. That's the thing that is available to everybody. That is the thing that we've all been trained on. The thing that requires the least amount of change management is a platform that people already exist in, and it's also a common language. It means that if I send you Word, you most likely have a license to open the Word and work with Word and then send me Word back, right? It's a protocol that everybody shares. Then different buttons in one specific piece of technology, that introduces a very specific constraint that says that there are only certain things that we can be doing, that we're always very much focused on one document that we have open, that we're focused on working on one piece of the entire picture. And since so much of my own practice is about zooming out and looking how the pieces connect together and how the pieces can be reshuffled, the cellular spot solution approach where we're always focused very much on one point in time and then taking a step back and reorchestrating the relationship to the entirety of whatever we're working on. I'm not really sure that that's necessarily the only thing that would be out there. This would be a very good thing to speculate on. Let's imagine that our piece of legal tech would not work in Word at all. What else would it be? Does it mean that we would create a completely new software? Does it mean that it would live And other software, I don't know, but I think that would be a very interesting feature to explore. I love it. I love that you did mention, you know, a few of the courses you took on project management, CS50. Can I, can I hear a little bit more about your thoughts nowadays about what those practical first steps might be? For me, the most life-changing or transformative skill or habit that I developed was to be a self-started learner. Nowadays, you can ask Perplexity to prepare you a reading list for whatever in the world, and you can really go out there and learn anything that tickles your fancy, which is amazing and is completely unprecedented. Whenever we're talking with any of the young lawyers, be it my students or the young lawyers that I've been mentoring, it is always the main thing to cherish your agency and to go for the things that intrigue you. And they don't necessarily have to always be those classical lawyer skills. We, you can apparently become a meme lord like Alex Su, or you can craft out a career being a legal podcaster like yours truly. And there's so many different ways how you can create a career that would be working for yourself specifically, but all you have to do is to take that and go for it. Second thing that I would say is try to prototype your path. Very often lawyers ask me, should I go for that legal engineering role? Like I was offered something, should I change my entire career and start doing something else. And that's such a high bar, right? Like taking a job is a really high bar because you're talking your financial security, you're talking your identity and everything. So think, try thinking about smallest possible way how you could try something out. With my students, when we're talking about becoming a legal designer, we pick a small document that's hanging outside of every courtroom in the Czech Republic and redesign this one piece of paper. Did you like it? Did you like the work? Were you annoyed with it? What else is in there, right? Try finding really small prototypes as to how you could get yourself to where you want to go and how you could try other things that you would be interested in. You never know what you're going to find, which is amazing. As a final question, I wanted to ask you, looking ahead, what kind of legal future are you personally trying to help to create through Attorney@Code, your teaching, and your advisory work? I love this question. For me personally, I always thought that law is the backbone of our democracy. It's the thing that sets the systems, that sets the processes, that sets the ground rules. And it is also where a lot of the conflict is resolved as well. The very fundamental piece for me is that in order to have a functioning democracy, we need confident lawyers who are not afraid to engage with new technologies, who can explore different things, who can be open to new ideas. And who are not afraid to make the thing and show the things to others. For me, especially as a teacher, but also in my, in my professional work outside of the classroom, it has always been about empowering people to coexist with law in a way that's accessible, that is confident, that is aligned with our values, and that upholds what we've been building up as a society, because I do think that the role of lawyers is absolutely unmatched in what we have. In my preferred future, we're not afraid of engaging with innovation. We're not afraid of change. We're not afraid of doing things differently. We're not afraid of maybe looking a little bit silly because you're a lawyer who's decided that they're going to try coding and that we're not afraid of going after those futures and acting with agency and humility. I appreciate you making the time to, to come on the show today, choosing one area of law and being stuck there forever. It's always, always incredible to hear more about what a legal career can look like and especially see good examples of going outside the beaten track. Thank you so much for making the time to be here today. Thank you so much for inviting me. Great. And thank you all for listening and tuning into today's episode, and we'll see you on the next one.