What does it really take to challenge the status quo and build a legacy in the legal world? Carolyn Elefant, a trailblazing energy lawyer and founder of MyShingle.com, shares her journey from being told she wasn’t “partnership material” to pioneering a solo law practice. How did she overcome the hurdles of starting out in the ‘90s without today’s tech? What’s her take on AI transforming the future of law? And what can her “Solo Manifesto” teach us about owning our talent? Dive into her story and find out.

And I think people don't take that into account. And so I think that they're often willing to sell for situations where they're taking advantage of, or don't get the full benefit of their talent because they don't realize that it has value to it. So that's important to make people realize that if you own your talent, you can control your destiny.

Jonathan Hawkins: Welcome Founding Partner Podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Hawkins. And today I'm really, really excited about our guest. We've got one of the OGs of the law entrepreneur space. One of the originals. So, this is somebody that I've followed for many many years. And excited to finally be able to sit down and have a conversation.

So today we've got Carolyn Elefant with us, and I'm sure a lot of people know who you are, but why don't you. Give us a brief introduction. Tell us, you know, where you are what you do, and there's a lot you do So we'll get into all that so maybe just stick with the law firm piece at first

Jonathan Hawkins: And that's how I originally found you years ago, and this was two firms ago for me I remember I was just I wanted to see anything out there about, you know, entrepreneur, about business development, about practicing law and all these sorts of things. And, you know, yours was one of the ones. So, let's talk energy law.

So, you know, when I think energy law, I think big firm. You know, gigantic kind of stuff. So why don't you explain what does that mean? And, sort of how do you do that? And particularly, how do you do that in a smaller practice setting?

My practice is a little more expansive. So anybody who's not represented by a big firm, that's kind of my target market. So I might be working with small renewable energy companies that are trying to change the markets or reduce barriers to being able to sell to big companies and compete, or I might be representing landowners who's property is going to be taken in eminent domain for a gas pipeline or an electric transmission line or I might work for a consumer advocate. Sometimes they'll outsource some of the work to me to fight a rate case if or fight a case at a federal agency.

Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah. The big firm, there's a lot of, a lot of nose, I imagine.

Carolyn Elefant: Yes.

Jonathan Hawkins: So, yeah, so, you know, I'm down here in Atlanta, down in the South. You know, more more I hear about these, you know, farms or land that's, you know, being converted to have like solar panels and those sorts of things. So you might represent the landowner or maybe like the company that's installing or maybe both.

Carolyn Elefant: It could be either one. Usually, I either represent the company in getting the authorization they need from the regulators to be able to sell the power, but I also might represent a landowner in negotiating the deal on the other side. In fact, I did just one of those deals a couple of weeks ago in Maryland.

Jonathan Hawkins: Well, cool. So I want to go through your journey a little bit. So you started out I'll say after law school, you started out in government. Is that a good?

Carolyn Elefant: Federal. Yeah, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. So they regulate the energy field from the federal perspective.

Carolyn Elefant: So what happened was I was interested in environmental law and the summer of my second year, I worked at a big law firm that was defending polluters, which didn't really bother me at the time. It raised a lot of interest in me in environmental issues. But I worked like a dog and I was one of the favorite associates and I discovered being a favorite associate just means you get more work.

So my colleagues were out like drinking and going to the bars and I was stuck at the office with another guy who was also a favorite associate. Didn't get us anywhere. So after that, I just decided that I wanted to take my first year after law school and do something a little more relaxed. But I had, you know, back then people would, the recruiters would come to campus and people would get jobs, you know, like, at the beginning of their third year.

And so that sounded interesting. So that's where I started.

Jonathan Hawkins: So you did that for two, three, four years. And then from there.

Did you go to big law? Is that,

Carolyn Elefant: Yeah, so it wasn't even that long. It was about a year and a half because I back then it was for that was the agency was a very sleepy agency today. It's very desirable because they're doing all the sexy, clean energy work. But back then it wasn't the most popular place. So there were a lot of stereotyped government workers.

So I very quickly came to the head. I got the hardest cases in the office because I was the only one doing the work because I was such an eager beaver out of law school. So there's nowhere else we could go. I hit the glass ceiling. So

Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah.

And I did all of that collectively. It was five years out of law school when I started my firm. And the reason I started my firm was because I was getting laid off from the firm that I was at. They said I wasn't partnership material. I like to say I wasn't associate material because again, I wasn't. I wasn't following orders, wasn't following through, working on stuff that was interesting to me, not necessarily the firm.

So.

Jonathan Hawkins: You were unemployable as they say.

Carolyn Elefant: Pretty much.

Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah. Yeah. So I want to go back. So you're in a sleepy, we'll call it agency. It reminds me, you know, the old thing about, you know, the post office. If you're working too hard, everybody else says, Hey man, slow down.

Carolyn Elefant: With energy, it wasn't quite as intense as, you know, working mergers and acquisitions at a big New York firm. So it wasn't quite as intense as that, but it was definitely, there was working on, you know, more working on the weekends, more working till like seven at night instead of being literally kicked out of the office at 5PM.

If I was in the government office at that five after five, the supervisor would say, you know, get out of here. You're not supposed to be here. So it was more intense. And there was definitely more work and there was more focus on billable hours. But at the same time, there was also a recession going on when I was working for the firm.

And so I think there wasn't quite as much work as there maybe had been in peak times.

Jonathan Hawkins: Okay. So you sort of get to the crossroads where they say, you know, we don't think you're, you know, your partnership for us, cause you're sort of doing your own thing. And then I guess you had a decision to make and you decided, I think this is when you decided to just go out and do your own thing.

Is that right?

My husband and I had bought a house at the same time we didn't have kids and I was married, so there was a second income. So I thought that this was going to be the time to go for it and maybe learn about other areas of law that I wasn't learning about in the energy space.

Carolyn Elefant: I know.

Was there anything else? Was there anything else out there?

Carolyn Elefant: There was so the DC bar had maybe now today the DC bar has like a whole three day boot camp but back then. They would have like an occasional speaker who would come in and talk about starting a firm and the woman who was doing the circuit at the time had, she basically just broken off from a big firm.

So she took her associate, she took her paralegal, she got financing from a bank and she told us at the talk, she said. You know, you're going to need like 30 or $40,000 in startup costs. And we were all looking at each other and we were thinking, if we had that much money, we wouldn't be starting a firm. We'd be taking some months of vacation.

Practice areas, and that makes a difference. It's really helpful to be able to see somebody who's doing what you want to do.

Jonathan Hawkins: And so how did you find your way? I mean, you went to see that woman talk and say, how did you figure it out? I mean, take me through that. It, I mean, it had to be seriously. I mean, probably exciting. You're learning a lot every day, but also, I mean, it's like you're just in the dark, largely, I would think it's like going out West before there were roads, you know, you're just like exploring,

Carolyn Elefant: It was like that. So first I tried to meet with people who I might partner up with. There's one woman who was kind of thinking about it, but she was in a completely different practice area. There was a guy who I talked to who said, you know, I don't think you're going to make any money at this. But it was just kind of, you know, there wasn't an instruction book.

So I had an email address, but nobody had emails. It didn't really matter. I mean, it was just a lot of common sense and I mean the hardest thing to figure out was like what to do about the phone situation because I didn't want to give out my home phone number. So at this virtual office space that I had they gave you a number and a receptionist would pick up the phone and basically, just take a message.

So what's going on? No, that was the thing too. Back in those days, people couldn't figure out that it wasn't fake office. They really thought there was a hetero receptionist and maybe a rude receptionist, but I.

Jonathan Hawkins: You're really busy, never there, and your receptionist hates you.

Carolyn Elefant: You know, that was one of my big, one of my biggest fears was having a phone call come through to my home phone and not being able to justify it. I mean, even like today, people will say that they're just working from home or calling from a home line. But back then I just thought it was like the curse of death that I would look so unprofessional and unserious if I were using my home phone number. So that was something I always tried to avoid.

Jonathan Hawkins: Well now, I mean, you get your office line sent to your cell phone. I mean, you can be anywhere and then you answer it. I mean, it's, completely different. So you had the phone challenge, which, you know, it's hard to really go back there, you know, back when we had fax machines and all that kind of stuff too.

Carolyn Elefant: No.

Jonathan Hawkins: Not invented at the time. Right.

Carolyn Elefant: Right. I think there was some kind of open office software product that was just very, I mean, it just wasn't very good. So I paid for the word perfect license. And then, you know, I had a computer and then my husband bought me a laptop because our computer, I was using the home computer and was in our basement and it felt like a dungeon.

I just didn't want to work. So I complained so much that my husband bought me a laptop, which at the time was like $1,500 and probably have less power on it than my phone has today.

Jonathan Hawkins: Probably weighed 50 pounds too, right?

It costs like $500 a month. There's a back in the 90s and it was only for 12 searches. Like it was a finite number of searches. So it was just crazy. So if I worked at the library, I could get access like at the law back then, the law libraries had access to, you know, they had like a common terminal where you could get access to Westlaw or Alexis.

So that was how I got the legal research, but it was a lot of book research and photocopying reporters and treatises and making a lot of copies and a lot of paper stuff still.

Jonathan Hawkins: Wow. So, how did you approach getting clients? That's always, you know, the big thing even now. People go out and it's like, you know, maybe you can start a firm and you have a, some book of clients, but a lot of people start and they don't have any. So how did you go about getting the name out there? Letting people know, saying, Hey, send me your stuff.

I remember I had Martindale Hubbell, and so if you remember that, the big, thick directories, and I found energy lawyers, and I, Just cold called them and I introduced myself and I said, I'm starting a firm. I'd love to come by your office and chat and learn more about the practice. Some people were really nice and they met with me.

And then I think they felt sorry for me because I think three or four people, three or four of those meetings resulted in them giving me contract work. So that was a nice start. And then one of the people I met eventually a year later rented me real office space. But then there were also people who said, well, why would I help my competitor?

So I met one guy who was doing like the technical parts of it. And we wound up teaming up on some projects for the government, which was like studying the regulatory system for ocean energy. So that was like on the energy side. And then I also did court appointing criminal defense work just because I wanted to get court time and because back then you could just, you know, there weren't that many people doing it.

And so you could. You could get paid and actually get hired. They would actually pick you for the case. And today it's very competitive. They won't let you, they very wisely won't let you handle the case unless you've had some experience, but they had a really a good training program.

Jonathan Hawkins: We know it's funny the first part, you know, going and meeting with people and introducing yourself, et cetera. That's like still in my view, one of the best ways really to get out there, you know, you got all the LinkedIn and the digital and the Google and all that stuff, but really, you know, the old fashioned, just meeting people.

Carolyn Elefant: Yeah.

Jonathan Hawkins: Takes time, but it works, right?

Carolyn Elefant: yeah, no, it definitely doesn't. I know I have hired people or sent contract work to people who might've called me about, you know, what it's like to start a firm and then. If I had a need to outsource work, I would get back in touch with them. So it's really a good way to be remembered too.

Jonathan Hawkins: So you got your firm, you know, you got it going. How long did it take where it was sort of sustainable in your view?

But I think it was about close to three years when it. You know, when I was equaling the revenue that I'd been earning at a firm.

Carolyn Elefant: So it was probably one of the first 50 or 60 lawyer blogs. There were definitely blogs like Ernie, the attorney, and then some like Bob Ambrosi's blog that started a month or two before mine. But I guess around the height of the .com, I had been thinking about a website for solo and small firms and it was going to be called My Shingle, but it wasn't going to be a blog.

It was going to be sort of like, a portal site, you know, like everything pets, everything's still on small firm and it was going to have like product reviews and sell things and that kind of site, but I didn't have the technology to put that together. And my husband used to follow a blog called slash dot, which was, it served the tech industry and they were making their code available publicly.

But in the early days of that blog, there were not, there wasn't a lot of traffic. I mean, some of the blogs were serving you know, like the immigration world. So you have people, you have an international audience and some of them were serving technology companies and you have, you know, tech people were reading blogs, but so and so far from lawyers are not reading blogs.

So I would have like maybe 15 or 20 people a day at the site I had and I had a feature. The one thing about that slash dot platform was it was very advanced. It would run in RSS feed and it allowed people to post comments and even submit a story that I could turn into an article very easily.

So it had many more features than some of the other platforms that were being used, but nobody took advantage of them. Nobody was posting comments for sending stories in. So it didn't really matter.

Jonathan Hawkins: I remember back in those days, you know, you had the blog role on the side where you would.

Carolyn Elefant: Oh, yes. Yeah.

Carolyn Elefant: Yeah. No, I had to. Right. I had to learn HTML to figure out, you know, how to change the colors and the font size and things like that. So, yeah, it was even you're right. I mean, even setting up something like that was much more difficult than it is today where you can, there's just things that you can do right out of the box.

Jonathan Hawkins: So you had your original idea of what it was going to be. And then that you said that sort of. So, you know, what was it in the beginning and maybe how has that site changed over the years?

So he was one of the featured people. Yeah, I would profile what lawyers are doing. And I also gave my opinion on solos and small firms. I talked about how they were disparately targeted in ethics cases. And I talked about, you know, women starting law firms or women being discriminated at big firms going off to start smaller firms.

So it always. I talked about some of the ethics rules that I disagreed with, so it was never a pure nuts and bolts site, because honestly, I find that stuff, I don't, some people thrive on that, and you know, there are so many blogs amongst our colleagues where people just like sing, you can just tell they love talking about like the tech or the automation or law firm culture stuff, and that just didn't interest me, so it was It gave opinions on sort of the place that Solos and Smalls occupy in the legal hierarchy because people weren't talking about that.

I would sometimes offer courses through the site. So, It always, you know, talked about topics that were current, but it also always had my voice and my opinion attached to it. And that's something that really hasn't changed, even though I don't blog as much these days as I used to

Jonathan Hawkins: so let me ask, you mentioned that, you know, solo attorneys back then maybe I don't know about now, but back then were perhaps targeted or more likely to get sued. sort of in trouble at the bar or whatever. So you were giving strong opinions about that. Did you ever have any uh, any backlash and anybody calling you out or pushing back on that?

Jonathan Hawkins: Well, if you do it long enough, you know, it's probably going to happen at some point. So, that's good the other thing, you know back then it was harder to start a firm. There wasn't much out there was just logistically harder compared to today what about sort of the view from other lawyers, cause I know you have a book that you wrote "Solo by Choice" which implies that, you know, back then people thought maybe you didn't have a choice.

So how did other lawyers sort of view you or how, what was your impression that they, how they viewed you back then?

Carolyn Elefant: So in my industry, people thought I was like a crazy person when I would go to these, because there were no young, there was maybe like one older woman lawyer who was running an energy firm with her husband. And then of course there were, you know, a handful of women lawyers who were partners at energy law at bigger law firms, but there was nobody like me.

Law firms didn't have marketing materials. I mean, back then you is all handshakes and golf course and you know, they didn't market. It was big firms didn't market. It was considered low class. So,

Jonathan Hawkins: Okay, so early on, you didn't really, I mean, you had all the big firms, you completely were completely differentiated, your own little niche, solo energy type lawyer, I assume there really weren't any others, you mentioned that one other lady are there others now? Do you have competitors sort of in your space?

But today it's completely different. There are so many women who are starting their own firms and so many lawyers who are breaking off and starting their own practices. And, you know, many of them will call me and tell me what they're doing. So that has really changed. There's, you know, you know, and it's been at different times.

Now, you have, like, data centers or crypto mines that also have a lot of energy needs. So the market is really split and so that kind of lends itself to these people starting either niche firms or, you know, because they may have, you know, a bigger firm might have a conflict. So, there's more of a disruption of the energy market too and that kind of breeds the need for more attorneys.

Jonathan Hawkins: So do you find that over the last, I don't know, decade that you've seen just a steady climb in work basically.

Carolyn Elefant: So my work is always very dependent on the political climate. And so I guess about 10 years ago. And so my, that's how my practice has evolved. I started doing the renewables work when money was being sent and when government money was going to renewables, like during the Obama administration, and then more, gas pipelines started being built.

And that was something that was very unique to the energy field too, because there were always disagreements of views before, but the decisions were still I would call them principled decisions or at least, you know, based, they were rational decisions. And then during the Trump administration, they became like off the rails.

So I'm not looking forward to Monday, but.

Jonathan Hawkins: It's going to be interesting to see, you know, he's a gas, gas, gas, but then he's got Elon Musk. That's, you know, electric car, electric car, It's going to, it's going to be interesting to see how all that?

Carolyn Elefant: It was.

Jonathan Hawkins: Out, right?

Carolyn Elefant: it should be really interesting, but either way, there's going to be infrastructure, whether it's transmission lines or gas pipelines. And so that's when I get the calls too.

Jonathan Hawkins: You're going to be busy.

Carolyn Elefant: Yeah.

Jonathan Hawkins: So I want to, the thing I noticed on My Shingle it's, it's the solo manifesto. And I just want to ask you, you know, what, is that? And, you know, tell me about. Why you put that out there and what's in it?

And I think people don't take that into account. And so I think that they're often willing to sell for situations where they're taking advantage of, or don't get the full benefit of their talent because they don't realize that it has value to it. So that's important to make people realize that if you own your talent, you can control your destiny.

I mean, that's really the whole point of it. And one of the best ways to own your talent is by starting your own firm. So that's really the crux and I think in the past, I mean, Flumberg talked about, you know, starting a law firm, even to some extent for work life balance, he talked about, you know, he kept a picture of his family on his desk.

Jonathan Hawkins: You know, it's funny as are interesting to see people talk about, you know, when people talk about wealth, it's usually money, but you know, there's been, you know, in recent years to talk about time, wealth and being able to maximize the amount of free time or whatever the, or control your time or, and that's what you're talking about there.

I think, you know, as a solo, you know, you're trading one set of problems maybe for a different, but you know, It's your destiny that you're controlling. Right?

Carolyn Elefant: Right? Yeah.

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So tell me about that. Is that different than the "Solo Manifesto" or is it sort of expanding the same ideas?

So the book has always been about the why of starting and then it. Sort of a how to guide and it kind of gives a lot of different perspectives. I think we're a lot of books about starting a firm fall short is that the authors kind of just write about their own experience and getting started. And I mean, there's, you can't cover everybody's experience.

You can create your own. So why would you want to read a book that tells you what the rules are and then just follow a new set of rules when you start your firm? So I tried to give like a lot of different ideas on the kind of nuts and bolts starting of a firm. So I tried to make it very comprehensive too.

Jonathan Hawkins: You know, I'll tell you just from my experience, it is nice to be able to set your own rules, but you got to figure out what those rules are. And sometimes it's easier just having them there, right?

Carolyn Elefant: That's true. That's true. And apparently there is some sort of benefit. I mean, studies have shown when people start with a formula, it's a faster path to success. So, those are things I talk about in the book. I mean, you know, if you, I'm not a big fan of a detailed business plan, but I, you know, give that as an option for people, there may be people who it works for.

So try to just give all the different approaches.

So, the sites have really changed, but those are the only two books that I've written.

Jonathan Hawkins: And so it's, again, you know, I mentioned this earlier, but you've always sort of been on the forefront of these technology. Changes and the acceptance of them into the law. So the, you know, the blogging sort of thing, social media. And now the new one is, you know, AI's, you know, that's everywhere. And and there's a lot of pushback.

Carolyn Elefant: I feel like the cutting edge, or being on the edge of things, is kind of my superpower. I don't really like to compete. And even though I feel like if I went to a head to head match with another attorney on a case that I would, you know, be able to match their performance. I feel like it's much easier to win when you've already got a head start.

And so that's how I've always been in my practice too. You know, when I started doing the pipeline cases, nobody else would touch those cases. I was getting them because they were getting dumped by other people. So I kind of laid the foundation for precedent. And now many of the environmental groups that turned those cases down originally are now vying for them because they see that they're winnable.

Jonathan Hawkins: And so, uh, AI that's the new thing. So, again, we saw the New York.

Carolyn Elefant: Yes.

Jonathan Hawkins: Bad decision in terms of bad decision of the lawyer.

Carolyn Elefant: Yeah.

Jonathan Hawkins: And so I think people are getting better with it, but it spooked a lot of lawyers. And again, you know, lawyers are just so concerned you got it. Ethics opinions that by the time they come out, they're already stale.

So maybe ask this. So I know that there are lots of ways you can use AI, there's lots of different a uh, options, you know, there's many platforms out there. So, how do you use it currently and how, what do you see in the future of how it's going to get used in legal?

So, I use it for that kind of legal research. I use it sometimes to maybe do some edits of writing that I've done. I use it a lot for marketing and marketing copy. And I also use it to empower my assistant because it used to be when I'd send newsletters out or come up with copy for webinars that I'm hosting or putting together slide decks.

It was more trouble for me to kind of explain to her everything that I mean, she's very capable and we've worked together for 17 years. She's a virtual assistant who I've never met in person, but with AI giving her that tool, she's able to do a lot of what used to be too much trouble for me to delegate to her.

Your opposing counsel doesn't know what to do with it when they get it. They get this cheerful email back in response to their nasty. So use it for things like that. More recently, I've been using it, like, playing around with it to see how it might predict the outcome of the case to help draft reply briefs.

This case that I had at the D.C circuit, I used it to help my colleague prepare. I asked it to, you know, kind of identify areas in the briefs where there were holes to help organize things. It makes it easier for me to help my colleagues because you know, it helps do some of the work for me and identifies holes.

So I don't have to go through things. I just so many different uses for it. I mean I have another case where it's a transmission line case and there's like a whole bunch of different studies that identify the impacts and I looked at the numbers and they were just a little bit different.

Jonathan Hawkins: It's truly amazing, really. It the speed that it can do some of this stuff compared to a human. So, you know, I've played around with ChatGPT, I've got a cloud account, but I haven't really played around on that yet. But, you know, I've heard people say that. For like writing that Cloud maybe is a little bit better.

I don't know. Do you have any opinions on, and then I've also heard people use one and then run it through a different one to rewrite it and do all these different things. So, uh, have you done that kind of stuff?

Carolyn Elefant: Yeah. So I have Cloud, I have paid accounts at Cloud perplexity and ChatGPT. The thing that's annoying with Cloud, Cloud, I do agree with you. So I was running through the TikTok oral argument to ask each platform, you know, what their prediction was based on the questions asked.

And that's not true at all. If you listen to the arguments, they were really all over the map. Cloud was really very granular there. Quoted pieces of the transcript to support, you know, what it said. It quoted like the exact questions that Gorsuch was asking because he picked up on First Amendment issues.

So, Cloud was very granular there. But the problem with Cloud is Cloud also doesn't like, there was a week where I couldn't even upload a document of more than like 10 pages to Cloud. It just like got jammed up or something. So, but in terms of the writing, I'm, I'm writing a law review article now on AI for energy law.

Jonathan Hawkins: You know, I, I've been doing some things on ChatGPT, like just testing it out. So I'm like, you know, go find, I'll say go to, you know, basically find my information, you know, go to the Georgia bar website, grab my information, but there are walls that have been placed on around a lot of websites. So there are definitely some limitations in terms of the ability to go do some of the things I've been asking it to do. Maybe that'll open up. I don't know.

Carolyn Elefant: Yeah, I think that will change the, I guess the big talk now is about AI agents. So AI being able to actually do something a human would do. So maybe the next time, if this AI agent were developed error for ChatGPT, it would actually be able to enter your password. Of course, you would have to give it access to your passwords to get on the website.

Jonathan Hawkins: I don't know about that. I don't know about

Carolyn Elefant: That's glorious. We'll give it back to your bank account.

Do you have any thoughts on that?

Carolyn Elefant: See, I've always been flummoxed by the big firm billing model to begin with. I just don't even know why it still works. I mean, clients seem to be willing to pay hundreds of dollars an hour for unlimited hours. I mean, I was just, I was at a settlement conference. Last month, a regulatory one, so there must have been like, you know, seven or eight companies represented by big firms, and we're just sitting there just like chit chatting for hours, like, while we're waiting for something to happen, it's just felt like this is, you know, I could hear the billable clock ticking.

So I think it has to make a difference, but unless clients are willing to say something about the fees they're paying. And I know, you know, in the utility cases, ratepayers are paying for the fees. And so it's, you know, there's a captive audience that's paying. It's not a company that cares about. I guess that's kind of what happens in bankruptcy too, where the estate ones are paying the fees.

And so that's why you have those astronomical fees in bankruptcy cases too. So I feel like until clients start saying something about it, or putting the heat on law firms, you're not really going to see a change in the model because they're certainly not going to be able to build for that kind of time anymore.

Jonathan Hawkins: I mean, it's crazy that the first year associates are, you know, pushing a thousand dollars an hour now.

Carolyn Elefant: No, it's crazy. It is.

Carolyn Elefant: I would agree with that. I remember, when I came to law school, Lexis was just being incorporated. But so in our legal research class, we kind of learned we use Lexis at the very end after we'd already learned how to use those decennial digest and those treatises. And I felt like the discipline that those imposed help us research better on Lexis because instead of just putting in some big broad term, we could kind of break things down into different categories. So I think it's helpful to understand kind of the process and the reasoning behind things. But at the same time, sometimes you can use these tools to sort of check up on your research.

So

Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah, I mean, because part of it, you know, you have a non lawyer out there, just a consumer of legal services. They go, you know, that I saw there was a tweet on this, I guess, and I think somebody ended up posting it over on LinkedIn. A pretty successful business guy, you know, billionaire, I think. He said he commissioned some sort of memo from a law firm. Three weeks. It took all this time and he got this thing and then he went to ChatGPT or whatever and got something and he is like, you know, law firms are dead.

And then of course, all the comments from the lawyers that, that are like, well, you had the, benefit of being able to put it next to the actual memo done by the lawyers that, so you know that it was pretty close to being right. Where if you don't have that, you'll never know. Right?

Carolyn Elefant: Right.

And then you got to private life too that you're dealing with. You know, you got your family and your, you know, husband, your kids, all that stuff. How have you been able to balance all that over the years?

Carolyn Elefant: So back when my daughters were young and still home. You know, I used to work. Well, I had a lot more energy too. I was younger and I used to just work late hours or work, you know, while they were eating dinner, I might be, you know, doing a blog post or doing some kind of lighter work while they were at home.

And I couldn't waste time, you know, going to a bar lunch because that would take out like two hours of my five hours. That's why social media was such a good marketing opportunity for me. Now, you know, I, my daughters are out of the house, so I have more time. So now the challenge is not having more creepage because when you know you have unlimited time, the work expands to fill that time. So I find that to be almost more challenging is to just put a stop on it.

Jonathan Hawkins: So as you look back over your career, mainly just your firm, where you had your own firm and you try to think about lessons that maybe you've learned that might be helpful for other attorneys out there that are earlier in the process. Are there any things that maybe you would not have done, or maybe there's something that you would have done sooner?

So, I mean, I think that, you know, there's a lot of things that you can do to market your practice or to learn more about different ways of practicing or, you know, events you can go to and things, and some of them are very expensive and you might be deterred from spending money on them.

So I think maybe I would have invested more and maybe just had a broader, maybe just thought a little bit bigger instead of just having thought about starting a firm that would just serve me, maybe just have thought bigger about, you know, just what the possibility could be. And think about also, I would have thought more about how, what you're doing can, you know, it really can change the practice of law.

It can change the way that people think about the law. It can change lives of people who work for you. And I. think I would have focused on that more too. So just the bigger impact.

Carolyn Elefant: Is a very good question. That is something that's on my mind. I had a milestone birthday in May. I turned 60 and I don't have a, I'm not going to curse, but I don't have an effing clue. So it's hard to decide. There's so many things and I'm not saying that, you know, you, you really look at things differently than when you're, you know, 30 or 40. I mean, of course you still have time, but you know, when you're 30, you can start a 30 year plan at 60, that's a little, you know, you've got maybe the three year plan, so it's less time to, see something out. So that's one of the things I've been thinking about is what, you know, how I want to spend these next years.

Jonathan Hawkins: You got any new more books in you? You got any, anything in that regard?

I just not sure what it would be about. I mean, one of the things I would like to do, maybe focus on more as one potential project is focusing on Women owning law firms as a means to diversify the profession because big firms have been working on that problem for so long and year after year the reports come out and there's still fewer women who are equity partners and women are getting a smaller percentage of what they bring in.

So when I figure out the answer, then I can teach other people how to do it.

Jonathan Hawkins: That's cool. You know, on, on the whole, you know, the women, law firm owners and really just, you know, just sort of the state of the wellness, whatever you want to call it. You know, obviously there's structural issues on, in the law firm side, but you know, I hear a lot and I've experienced it.

You know, you got judges that sometimes make decisions that are not helpful to any of the lawyers involved. Sometimes you got clients that are just so demanding. They're like, you know, get it to me on Monday. And it's, you know, it's beyond just the law firm side of it. And I really feel like everybody needs to really get educated on this and open their mind on it.

Carolyn Elefant: Yeah.

Jonathan Hawkins: not just, Not just the firms.

Carolyn Elefant: Right. Yes, that.

Jonathan Hawkins: But Christmas is on Monday. What are you talking about? So, another question. So you seem to be an entrepreneur just at heart.

I don't know if you've had this in your blood forever, but another question I like to ask folks is if you weren't practicing law, if you went back, if it wasn't law what would you have done? What would you maybe what other type of career would you have pursued?

Carolyn Elefant: Oh, I would have done something in science. I really like science classes and I dropped them probably just because they seemed a little bit more challenging. But all of my sisters are in the sciences. My dad was a chemist. So I would love to work for, you know, companies that are using AI to develop new um, technologies. scientific advancements.

So I would definitely do something with the sciences. And there's there probably is a lot of entrepreneurial money to be made to if you know, self courses for lay people on learning about science or clinical trials or things like that. So opportunities there too.

Jonathan Hawkins: You got your new idea there.

Carolyn Elefant: Yeah.

Jonathan Hawkins: Well, cool. So just real quick, one last question you know, as you look, you know, again, you've been on the forefront for your entire career as here, and maybe that's the answer, but as you look forward, just what do you see in terms of law practice any trends, any predictions about what it might look like? 10 years from now?

And so I think we're going to see maybe simple motions or forms just generated electronically and not really think about it. And I think what we're also going to see though, I think that what is really exciting is if we use these tools correctly, we're going to see whole new areas of law be developed because you have the time and you know, when you can get rid of these mundane tasks, you can actually come up with new theories or generate new approaches to, to doing law and also to presenting your cases. You know, you can just do different levels of research, do more research. So I think we're going to see better quality pleadings and we're going to see better decisions.

So I think we're going to see really an improvement in the body of law that we have. And I think that's really exciting.

Carolyn Elefant: Yeah. So I think yeah, definitely on the appellate front. I mean, it also opens the doors by reducing the cost of cases. You know, it opens the door to pursuing these, you know, more issues on appeal and that helps advance the law. So I think we're going to see some exciting developments. I mean, you know, in, those aspects.

And I think that's something really to look forward to. I was certainly looking forward to that.

Jonathan Hawkins: I really appreciate you spending some time with me. This has been really fun for me. And like I said, I've been following you for a long time. So I appreciate everything that you've done in your career. And I think it's great and keep going. Yeah there's, there's plenty more to do.

So for anybody out there that wants to find you or your stuff, where's the best place to find you? Do we send them to My Shingle or somewhere else? You, You tell us.

Jonathan Hawkins: That's a good point. Stay tuned. Well, Carolyn, again, thank you so much for coming on.

Carolyn Elefant: Thank you for having me. This has been great.