In this episode, Tyson Ballard speaks to Elizabeth De Stadler, the Founding Director of Novcon, Director of Rehabilitated Lawyer, and Hey Plain Jane, for an insightful discussion on plain language, contracts, and adding humour to law. They dive deep into the importance of plain language in legal documentation, its diverse applications, and it’s fascinating intersection with privacy law and behavioural science while gaining valuable insights into overcoming challenges, embracing failures, and fostering continuous learning in entrepreneurship.

Novcon is a consultancy specialising in translating complex documents into understandable language.

Rehabilitated Lawyer is a platform or initiative aimed at supporting lawyers in overcoming challenges and fostering personal growth within the legal profession.

Hey Plain Jane is a project or organization focused on promoting plain language and making legal documents more understandable and accessible.

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Tyson Ballard: All right, well, the wonderful Elizabeth, welcome to the Legal Dispatch Podcast. This has been a long time coming I’ve known you for quite some time and chatted lots and I’ve been super excited about this conversation we’re going to have today. Welcome.

Elizabeth De Stadler: Thank you for persevering. Likewise, I’m excited to have this conversation. We’ve spoken about so many topics in the past, so it’ll be interesting to see how you weave them together.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, yeah. Excellent. Maybe just to begin with, for the audience, maybe you could just do a little introduction, tell us who you work for, and what you do essentially. Should we start there?

Elizabeth De Stadler: Yeah, we can start there. I would like to take it back a couple of years. So, I started my career as an insurance lawyer, acting for the insurance. So, I’m going to hell, like all the lawyer jokes apply. And I was working at a big law firm in Johannesburg. And this was around 2008, and we got this new piece of legislation called the Consumer Protection Act, which has sort of plain language provisions in it, and I started thinking about what if all these people whose claims I’m rejecting understood their policies? It boggles the mind. And then I left Big Law, and I did a master’s in behavioural economics and plain language. After that, I started my own consultancy, mostly focusing on translating complex documents, mostly contracts into understandable language. And then of late, I’ve also added the wellness for lawyers’ angle to our little corner of the world. So, we do law and information design. We say no bullshit legal services, with a bit of fun.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, fantastic. I mean, just for the audience, do you want to explain in plain terms what plain language is, and how it applies to contracts? It’s quite an interesting topic, including fair patterns and dark patterns and things like that.

Elizabeth De Stadler: Yeah. Yeah, I mean I’m a chameleon. I shed or I change colours very often. So, one of the areas of expertise that I’ve tried in the last couple of years was privacy law. Because there is this interesting intersection between Privacy law, just as the regulatory topic that everybody knows and then how we use behavioural science, how we use language to essentially trick people into giving us their data, which you know, ethics and all of that. So plain language, in very simple terms, is helping your audience understand the information that you’re giving to them, to find what is relevant to them and to help them understand what they must do with that information. It has obvious application in consumer-facing documentation so terms and conditions, at the moment I’m working on a returns policy, privacy notices are also a good example of that. And in South Africa, all those types of documentation or any legal notice required by law must be in plain language. Quite recently, ISO, the International Standards Organization, also issued a plain language standard. It’s something that has been around since about the 70s. It started in America, where they started enforcing government organizations to communicate in plain and understandable language. And then it’s also got an application in business-to-business contexts because, and that was what my master’s was about, was to make the point that companies or organisations can’t read. It’s always a person reading a document. And what the research has shown is that legalese is just as hard to understand for lawyers as it is for laypeople. And if you think of a contract primarily as a way of helping people work together, everybody must be on the same page. So that’s basically what plain language is. It’s just making sure everybody’s on the same page.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, I mean, I think between the two of us, we must have seen some incredibly poor language in contracts in our time.

Elizabeth De Stadler: Yeah, horrendous.

Tyson Ballard: Nowadays, I kind of just find them hilarious because they’re almost oxymorons and turning themselves upside down and just putting words in contracts that just don’t need to be there. But yeah, definitely a worthy cause. You’ve always struck me as someone who can take a dry topic like contracts, I think when we first met it was L-I-B-O-R and somehow make it exciting. I don’t know where you get that passion or what drives you in that way. But could you kind of talk a little bit about why it’s important to put energy behind these dry topics and, I guess muster some excitement to make things change in that area? Like, where does that stem from?

Elizabeth De Stadler: That’s a very, very good question. So, there’s a personal answer and a sort of professional answer and then there’s the spiritual answer, right?

Tyson Ballard: So, let’s start with the personal answer.

Elizabeth De Stadler: So, I mean, I’m a bit of my go-to sort of way of making life fun for myself is humour as you would have noticed. So, we coined kind of the hashtag ‘fun law,’ which has taken off a bit. It doesn’t just relate to injecting humour into serious topics. For me, it is about taking things that are very important. So firstly, understanding what is important and then making it intriguing or interesting or appealing or delightful or sometimes scary. Sometimes I amp up the fright part of it, you know, but anything I can do to get sustained attention from people, which has gotten harder and harder over the years. So, for me, it started as a way just to make the repetitive tasks in law a little bit more bearable. I was a litigation attorney in insurance law, and it was really depressing. And it started as a way of just finding meaning for me, litigation was fun. It was a bit like an extreme sport, but ultimately you got the feeling that no one is winning. I started looking at things like boilerplates, because typically, what a lot of people don’t realize is the most litigated clauses are those boilerplates, the thing at the end of the agreement, that nobody reads or redrafts or thinks about until something goes wrong. So, in time bar clauses, you can only bring a claim within a certain period or, non-variation clauses. Most litigated clauses globally, often because people are trying to find a way to say, well, we agreed on something else. And then you go, ‘Oh, time bar clause.’ And no one reads them. So, I found that I have to be a little bit outrageous. And I just basically want people to stop having to go to court. Just have relationships that last. It has economic value. If I do the consumer work, it gives people back some dignity in contracting. For me, it’s about trying to make people’s lives better. And making my life better in the process.

Tyson Ballard: No, it’s amazing. And I tip my hat to you. Like, what does the day in the life of Elizabeth look like? What’s an average day? And, I know, maybe there isn’t an average day, but what are your habits and what does a day look like?

Elizabeth De Stadler: Yeah, I’m giggling at that question because I’ve had a very, very busy couple of weeks. So, I also just like any professional and lawyers specifically, go through these times where I don’t get to have my ideal day. So, there are a couple of things that are important to me. Reading is kind of like my therapy. I try to do some reading first thing in the morning. I try to get moving. You and I both like waves and hills and things you can charge. I love that word, by the way, charging. Charging for me, so I like to get outside. I live in Cape Town, so it’s wonderful outside. So, that is something that I try to do whenever I can. My days are full and varied. Lately, I spend a lot of time training, teaching, and mentoring lawyers. So, the other thing that drives me, and again, that’s the personal reason, is to help lawyers with their mental health issues in the industry, it is absolutely rife. And it has to do with, I think, a feeling of a lack of meaning or connection to meaningful work. So, I try to help lawyers to find that again. Whether it is through teaching them how to write in ways that are compelling to their clients or their colleagues, or whether it’s one-on-one mentoring. So, I do quite a bit of that every day. I try to do a bit of writing every day. As I said, the last couple of days, I’ve been writing a returns policy for a big online retailer, which is a hell of a lot of fun. I get to spend time with people who are from other disciplines, like information designers, graphic designers and change managers. So, we’re a very eclectic little group, I call them my merry band of misfits.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, you’re a little outbid. I’ve been fortunate enough to meet a few. What about your morning rituals? Like do you have any? Are you a coffee person? Do you wake up and go for a walk? I’m interested to know what your morning rituals are.

Elizabeth De Stadler: So, I’m an introvert masquerading as an extrovert. A lot of people find this really difficult to believe. So, I recently saw a quote, which I thought, yeah, that’s true, ‘My alone time is for your safety.’ The key to my morning rituals is to spend some alone time first thing in the morning. That means getting up before my goals do. So, I normally feel that either by doing something physical, like going for a hike or going for a surf, or if I don’t feel like doing something physical that day, just sitting outside and reading a little bit first thing in the morning. I’m not big on meditation. I wish I were. I’m a bit too restless, I think. So, for me, it’s always one of those two things. And then, we have some good family time first thing in the morning. I have two children. And then, the day starts.

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Tyson Ballard: Yeah, yeah.

Elizabeth De Stadler: But that quiet time is super important.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, it’s quite interesting. Like, I am surprised to hear that you’re an introvert, but I know a few with incredibly big personalities that are the same as well. And that alone time is quite important and maybe that’s your key to keeping well, mentally as well.

Elizabeth De Stadler: It shows. Yeah. I have a couple of other things I find. I’m a huge proponent and I’m very privileged that I can do that, but I do therapy. The other thing that people find really surprising about me is that I have depression and I have had it for about a decade. But I do believe that I don’t see it as a disease really, like my psychiatrist 10 years ago told me your depression cures you, and to that, I swore at him, because I thought that’s a stupid thing to say, but I understand now, like what he meant, because I think it’s a bit of a superpower actually.

Tyson Ballard: I was just about to say it sounds like a superpower.

Elizabeth De Stadler: You have to be so careful. But all the warning signs that I get, it forces me to be mindful, which is also essential if you’re going to make really boring stuff interesting. You have to be interested in the meaning behind things. And that it’s almost a form of professional mindfulness. I go like, what makes this thing compelling? What makes a non-variation clause interesting?

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, yeah…

Elizabeth De Stadler: You’ll find it, pathologically curious.

Tyson Ballard: Excellent. I’m always really interested in either the internal conversation or the conversation you had with your partner that made you decide to become an entrepreneur. What was the tipping point? I know there’s probably some unrest in terms of your soul about kind of what you were doing in that insurance capacity and maybe not giving the best out to the world. But what was the exact point and the conversation that you had and when did you decide to kind of, you know?

Elizabeth De Stadler: Yeah, you’re making it sound deliberate.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, dive deep into it and start a business essentially.

Elizabeth De Stadler: Well, at the time when I left the big law firm, and I think this is a very common story, I was properly burnt out. So, I’m also a very, very competitive person. I found the whole setup of billable hours, and everybody’s competing to get the most billable hours or make your budget the fastest. It’s that typical thing that happens, you’ve got A type of personality in a competitive scenario. So, it wasn’t quite as considered maybe as I make it out to be. At the time I already started having this sort of inkling that there might be a better way of thinking about the law.

Not just in terms of when things go wrong, how do we litigate, it was very interesting to me, but I had this sort of restless feeling. And then I went to UCT, the University of Cape Town, and for me, a new world opened up. So even though I studied information design, the communication aspect of it and information architecture and visualization, which was always interesting to me, the world opened up for me when I started reading about behavioural economics and decision theory and how people process information. I’m obsessed with brains and why they work the way they do. So, when I read a book called Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, and shortly after that, a book called Nudge by Sunstein and Thaler, that just changed how I saw what it is to be a lawyer. And then I just started getting clients. I was teaching at the university, but I started doing some consulting work. So that was quite a soft entry into entrepreneurship. It got a bit harder after a while, but I don’t know, I like the freedom.

Tyson Ballard: What were the hard bits? Why did it get hard?

Elizabeth De Stadler: Cashflow will kill you. It has ups and downs. It was almost impossible to do on your own. I have a lot of respect for sole practitioners. I think it’s very, very hard and you have those ebbs and flows of work but it’s also very lonely. So, for me, things started changing when I stopped working just for myself as a sole practitioner and I started taking on partners and then taking on juniors. Running a business was hard initially. We’re not trained for that.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, yeah. How many years ago was this?

Elizabeth De Stadler: This was, this was sort of, yeah, 2016, 2017. We got a big client right off the bat, but then all your eggs are in one basket. So, when that project was over, we didn’t even have a website. I wasn’t on social media. I didn’t know the first thing about how to go get a client and you have a payroll and it’s going to run. So that was repeatedly jumping off a cliff and growing wings on the way down, right?

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, yeah, building the plane while you’re flying it.

Elizabeth De Stadler: Yeah, exactly. But it’s fun. For me, I get restless. So, you know, it’s nice I have the freedom to reinvent the business whenever I feel like it. Yeah.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, yeah. That’s great. Yeah, I think you’re in such a sweet spot because you definitely can pivot quite easily because your topics are quite broad. But still, I know you were heavily involved in LIBOR and things like that, which is obviously still connected to the True North that you’re talking about. You’re still able to take on interesting and varied topics under the True North umbrella, almost.Top of Form

Elizabeth De Stadler: Yeah, I mean, essentially, there’s no problem that doesn’t interest us in some way, shape or form. In that way, we’re almost more like management consultants, although that’s a bit of a swear word, I suppose. But people come to us with problems that other people couldn’t solve. And then we try and be creative and innovative by the different sort of problem-solving techniques that we bring, the different sort of design techniques that we bring. My favourite day of the month is when we have our book club because the other day, for instance, I did a whole training session with lawyers about writing, but I used quotes from a book on potty training that one of my colleagues was reading because that’s just what innovation is, right? It’s putting weird ideas together because they work.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, I can see the parallel. It’s a very simple instruction on how to go to the toilet when you’re a little kid, which essentially is probably as plain language as you potentially can get, right? So yeah, what a wonderful analogy. Yeah, I’m sure you probably had a lot of fun with that.

Elizabeth De Stadler: I don’t know if they did, but I did. And that’s all I care about.

Tyson Ballard: Well, what about if you were asked to give a TED Talk on an area that is not in your speciality or something outside of your main area, essentially, and it can’t be stealing pens, what do you think that topic would be and why?

Elizabeth De Stadler: Slime mould.

Tyson Ballard: Slime mould?

Elizabeth De Stadler: Yeah.

Tyson Ballard: Please explain.

Elizabeth De Stadler: Really? So, slime mould, it’s a single-cell organism. It’s beautiful, you can go Google it and you’ll see the most amazing images. And basically, there was this experiment many, many years ago. I think it was the city of Tokyo that wanted to optimize its travel system. And what they did, they took, and they put little slime mould like oats. They put little nodules of oats exactly the same distance apart as the big business hubs in the city, and then they dropped the slime mould in the middle, and then they watched it grow. And doing that they could plot the most efficient route. You know, and they redesigned their transport system following the patterns that were created by this single-cell organism.

Tyson Ballard: That is amazing.

Elizabeth De Stadler: It is amazing. There’s a video of it growing. It’s amazing. What I find interesting is this idea of collective intelligence, and I suppose you’d probably find slime mould fans amongst people who are developing sophisticated AI. But it’s also a nice metaphor for how people learn, hive intelligence, which I think is sort of an underutilized concept in businesses and law firms. Just figuring out how to get people to work together. It’s interesting to me. I don’t know if that would be my TED Talk. I suspect someone’s already done a TED Talk on slime mould.

Tyson Ballard: Well, I think I’m going to Google that. It’s weird, you know, like this week I interviewed Andy Wishart, the founder of Contract Express as well. And we were talking about weird hobbies. And he was talking about how he’s obsessed with laundry. I was chatting to him about it because I’ve just finished a leadership course where I was fortunate enough to be in a group with some amazing people. And one of them was the coach of the Milwaukee Bucks. And after they won the NBA, he was talking about how everyone celebrated in the streets and the team did the parade and stuff. But he went and mowed his lawn and he’s obsessed with lawn mowing. So, he listens to lawn mowing podcasts, etc. So, yeah, it’s amazing, I think you’d be happy with the terminology, how these eccentric entrepreneurs have these awesome…not just hobbies, but interests.

Elizabeth De Stadler: I’ve been called worse.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, I’m sure you have.

Elizabeth De Stadler: I think we have the ability, but again, it’s that curiosity, isn’t it?

Tyson Ballard: It’s the curiosity, isn’t it?

Elizabeth De Stadler: I’m always thinking when I’m reading something, like how can this help me with the problems that I’m seeing? I’m a big fan of analogous thinking, so thinking how is this a problem? For this problem, on this returns policy, for instance, the client asked us to benchmark with other online retailers and the returns policies were universally shit, which is a legal term.

Tyson Ballard: So, you could say that in your benchmarking study.

Elizabeth De Stadler: Yeah, it’s universally shit. If people are having better experiences with their returns at another online retailer, it’s in spite of their returns policies, not because of it.

And then suddenly, we started thinking, okay, but like reverse logistics, what else has got that sort of characteristic? So, we started benchmarking in insurance. We start benchmarking in travel. We start benchmarking anywhere that has the characteristic of I’m going to give you something back and you’re going to give me my money back. I think it helps. I think that’s why entrepreneurs are the way they are. So, they’re always looking for, oh, this thing can help me with this other thing.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, it’s interesting. I’m kind of the same as well. I mean, I read a lot as well, but you can take inspiration from anything, from watching movies, from going to a nice restaurant to checking into a hotel to reading something, listening to music, listening to lyrics even and stuff like that. So yeah, I’m exactly the same. I think our minds think very, very similar.

Elizabeth De Stadler: People think we flit between ideas, but it’s, you know, we just want to put things together.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, exactly. What about, speaking of kind of curious people and individuals, when I say the word successful, who’s the first person that comes to your mind and why?

Elizabeth De Stadler: I’ve developed an unhealthy obsession with Alex Hamilton from Radiant.

Tyson Ballard: Unhealthy obsession?

Elizabeth De Stadler: Yeah, like I think it’s a matter of time before we start a commune and we’re in a throuple or something.

Tyson Ballard: That would be an interesting commune because the last time I met Alex he was force-feeding me tequila.

Elizabeth De Stadler: I’m a bit obsessed with him and his book called Sign Here, and how he’s thinking about this topic of large language models and how we might use it to make contracting better. But I just love how his mind works. I mean, I don’t know how successful he is. He looks very successful, but I find it really interesting how he cuts to just the quick of things. Probably also because it suits me. What he had to say about large language models recently in contracting is that ultimately the thing that matters the most is that you’ve got short, clear, relevant terms, which resonate. So, I’m a big fan of these thought leaders who put in the work to think hard.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, what’s your prediction on the whole LLM space in terms of large language models and the impact on our industry?

Elizabeth De Stadler: My general philosophy to futurism goes back to Nassim Taleb who wrote Black Swan and Anti Fragile he says no one fucking knows.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah. Yeah. And if you think you know, you don’t.

Elizabeth De Stadler: No, I think there are certain characteristics that lawyers will need to remain relevant, and I try to teach people those. I think what is exciting to me is that human skills are becoming more and more important again. So, creativity, problem-solving, understanding problem-solving techniques, curiosity, resilience, adaptability to change, that it’s going to change the way we practice. I think that’s a foregone conclusion. In any given year, there are probably 20 things that will change ultimately the way we practice. AI is just the one that we focused on last year. It was frustrating, a little bit. I’m guessing for you as well because very little of what happened last year was new. And sometimes, I think like what it highlighted for me is we’re short on people who think hard, right? We’re not thinking hard like why was anybody surprised that LLMs would elucidate case law? If you asked that legal question, that’s how it works. The word probabilistic is the third word in the terms and conditions. So that’s why I’m a fan of the hard thinkers. The modern legal philosophers, you know?

Tyson Ballard: It’s a tough one, isn’t it? Because I think there’s still a place for it. But then, definitely the cognitive, deep thinking, problem-solving, it’s not there yet. If you want to reference a policy and stick a nice gooey with the chat GPT, in front of it, it says can Tyson and Elizabeth go skateboarding down a hill?

Elizabeth De Stadler: My mom says no. Like father, everybody says no.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Elizabeth De Stadler: Yeah. I mean, it has changed. It has changed my life for the better. I mean, the plain language practitioners will know. I mean, it’s made our lives easier because I can feed it a beautifully drafted set of credit card terms, a true story. And I can say, can you redraft this in the voice of Dolly Parton? Please don’t change the meaning. It’ll do that in a split second, and it’ll do a fairly good job. So, it has made certain parts of my job just much quicker, but that decision of what should be in those credit card terms. That’s the human one. Yeah, exactly. Because it’s about a relationship. And it can regurgitate a hundred shit credit card terms. But I didn’t ask you whether I’m allowed to swear on this, on this podcast. That ship has sailed.

Tyson Ballard: There’s no PG setting, unfortunately, on this one. Yeah, great. What about making mistakes? How has a failure or apparent failure set you up for success later? Do you have a favourite failure of yours?

Elizabeth De Stadler: I don’t know, like on the skateboarding topic. I mean I fell hard a couple of years ago but that turned out to be one of my favourite accidents ever. It made for some interesting thinking about what is it that attracts me to what the psychologist calls, edge work. As anybody who likes slightly dangerous sports, will identify with that line of you’re not quite safe. And why I find that exhilarating, I mean the point that I want to make about failures, I think, part of the reason why lawyers are so ill has to do with two things, one is perfectionism. This idea that in order to justify our high fees, we have to be perfect, is a problem. And then there’s this sort of, you’ve broken out of it, I’m sure, but there’s this sort of institutionalized abuse that we put our juniors through because we think it’s almost hazing what happens in law firms. You need to be tough, right? And both of those things breed this fear of failure, the fear of the second draft, the third draft, and the fourth draft, feedback becomes scary. I don’t see it like that. Like I see it all as just a giant experiment. With the people I mentor, I try and teach them to be comfortable with saying, I don’t know, and all you need to do is add the word yet. I don’t know yet. And so that’s the one sort of affirmation that I use is I don’t know yet and also freedom. Freedom to fail, freedom to suck. I’m just experimenting with this. Yeah, this iteration, this draft did not work. I’m going to try it again. It’s not a failure. I’m experimenting. I’m trying to see what works, and what doesn’t work. And when you look at studies of highly successful people, it’s not that they don’t fail, it’s that they fail more frequently and at a quicker rate than other people. I mean, you can go and look at entrepreneurs, you can go and look at artists. They just tried more. Einstein is an example. You just tried more. And moved on, try and move on.

Tyson Ballard: I listened to a lot of Alan Watts and he’s always talking about if you want to be good at something, you need to be with it. And you need to be present with it. I mean, it’s probably just like you’re saying, it’s a much longer route to success or whatever you define success as, but if you’re not having that freedom to experiment and make mistakes. I wonder if it’s kind of linked a little bit to education, like even from schooling ages where you’re either right or wrong in a test, to law school where it’s almost like a binary answer to a problem when you’re kind of researching matters or regulation and things like that. And then it all boils down to a test, which you either pass or fail and you get a law degree. And then obviously you get thrown into the deep end with the juniors trained. You have this idea in your head of what you think is right or wrong, and what is perfect and it’s quite binary, whereas it’s not like that in life, it’s much more grey.

Elizabeth De Stadler: And you’re taught that it’s bad to be wrong. My favourite, one of my favourite authors, Daniel Kahneman, is the father of behavioural economics, who won a Nobel Prize, goes by Danny Kahneman, which I find very amusing. But anyway, I think it was in an interview with Adam Grant, that Adam Grant asked him why he always looks so happy when someone proves him wrong. And Danny said it’s because at that moment I’m less wrong than before.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, it’s true.

Elizabeth De Stadler: So, I’m in the early stages of writing a book and I’ve decided to call it less wrong than before. If you can say you’re less wrong today than you were yesterday, you’re winning.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, exactly. Well, having that reflection kind of mindset, what advice would you give to your younger self? Thinking about the juniors and thinking about Elizabeth straight out of university.

Elizabeth De Stadler: Yeah, don’t take it so seriously.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, but you don’t.

Elizabeth De Stadler: I used to. I wish I didn’t get trapped quite so much in that sort of achievement mindset where you’re chasing numbers. I would not tell myself to do anything differently, because I wouldn’t be here if I did things differently. I think everything had its role in my evolution, but yeah, I would have said none of it matters quite as much as you think. And the minute you make peace with your sort of relative irrelevance, a lot of the pressure goes away. So, I think I said to someone, I’m like a mobile library, I’m making book recommendations left, right, and centre. If it’s annoying, stop me. But the book by Oliver Berkman, called 4,000 weeks. If nobody reads any of the books you and I have mentioned, I mean, 4,000 weeks I feel like it’s rewired my brain a little bit.

Tyson Ballard: Ah, okay. Well, I want to join this book club. So, I know we’ve got the guys in legal who skateboard or surf, but I feel like I’m an honorary member of the ones that steal pens from clients. And then maybe we need another one for that little book club.

Elizabeth De Stadler: Yeah, we’re starting one. We’ve called the new business Rehabilitated Lawyer. There’s definitely going to be a book club. We’ve just started, some people call it the goat company because my new obsession is goats. But that’s where we want to get stuck into understanding the reasons behind the wellness crisis in the legal industry. And I desperately, like this is my IKIGAI, my purpose in life, I want to keep the creative people in law because we need them. And at the moment, I don’t think we’re doing a good job of it to keep the innovators and the entrepreneurs and the creatives in the industry. So, I want to get stuck into that. And I think a book club will definitely help and be fun.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, absolutely. Well. I definitely think you’re in the right place by the way, like you are a hundred percent where you should be in terms of the advice to yourself.

Elizabeth De Stadler: Yeah. I’m happy.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, exactly. Well, what about a theme song? What would be your theme song?

Elizabeth De Stadler: Wow, that’s a good one. There’s a song by a South African band, I think they’re called Sunset Sweatshop or something like that. And there’s a song called ‘Coming Along’ it’s got that typical sort of South African beat, that I’m sure you’re familiar with. And it’s just such a nice song about joining a tribe or joining a movement. Are you coming along? I’ll send you a link to it. Yeah. I think it’s Sunset Sweatshop.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, great.

Elizabeth De Stadler: Yeah. So, I often play it at the end of my keynotes, because this is the thing that we also say a lot, and we’ve got stickers that say if standing up for yourself burns a bridge, I’ve got matches. We ride at dawn.

Tyson Ballard: That’s brilliant. I love it. I love it. Yeah.

Elizabeth De Stadler: I’m turning into a revolutionary.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, exactly. All right. Well, I mean, just on that note, it’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast. Thank you so much for making the time. Lots of tips and tricks, and lots of great book recommendations, so we’ll be sure to kind of make sure we highlight those in the transcript. And yeah, thanks again. Thank you. It was a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate it.

Elizabeth De Stadler: No, agreed. It’s the easiest one I’ve ever done. But as you said, we were overdue, but thanks so much for having me.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, excellent. Thanks, Elizabeth. Cheers.

Tyson Ballard: All right, well, the wonderful Elizabeth, welcome to the Legal Dispatch Podcast. This has been a long time coming I’ve known you for quite some time and chatted lots and I’ve been super excited about this conversation we’re going to have today. Welcome.

Elizabeth De Stadler: Thank you for persevering. Likewise, I’m excited to have this conversation. We’ve spoken about so many topics in the past, so it’ll be interesting to see how you weave them together.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, yeah. Excellent. Maybe just to begin with, for the audience, maybe you could just do a little introduction, tell us who you work for, and what you do essentially. Should we start there?

Elizabeth De Stadler: Yeah, we can start there. I would like to take it back a couple of years. So, I started my career as an insurance lawyer, acting for the insurance. So, I’m going to hell, like all the lawyer jokes apply. And I was working at a big law firm in Johannesburg. And this was around 2008, and we got this new piece of legislation called the Consumer Protection Act, which has sort of plain language provisions in it, and I started thinking about what if all these people whose claims I’m rejecting understood their policies? It boggles the mind. And then I left Big Law, and I did a master’s in behavioural economics and plain language. After that, I started my own consultancy, mostly focusing on translating complex documents, mostly contracts into understandable language. And then of late, I’ve also added the wellness for lawyers’ angle to our little corner of the world. So, we do law and information design. We say no bullshit legal services, with a bit of fun.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, fantastic. I mean, just for the audience, do you want to explain in plain terms what plain language is, and how it applies to contracts? It’s quite an interesting topic, including fair patterns and dark patterns and things like that.

Elizabeth De Stadler: Yeah. Yeah, I mean I’m a chameleon. I shed or I change colours very often. So, one of the areas of expertise that I’ve tried in the last couple of years was privacy law. Because there is this interesting intersection between Privacy law, just as the regulatory topic that everybody knows and then how we use behavioural science, how we use language to essentially trick people into giving us their data, which you know, ethics and all of that. So plain language, in very simple terms, is helping your audience understand the information that you’re giving to them, to find what is relevant to them and to help them understand what they must do with that information. It has obvious application in consumer-facing documentation so terms and conditions, at the moment I’m working on a returns policy, privacy notices are also a good example of that. And in South Africa, all those types of documentation or any legal notice required by law must be in plain language. Quite recently, ISO, the International Standards Organization, also issued a plain language standard. It’s something that has been around since about the 70s. It started in America, where they started enforcing government organizations to communicate in plain and understandable language. And then it’s also got an application in business-to-business contexts because, and that was what my master’s was about, was to make the point that companies or organisations can’t read. It’s always a person reading a document. And what the research has shown is that legalese is just as hard to understand for lawyers as it is for laypeople. And if you think of a contract primarily as a way of helping people work together, everybody must be on the same page. So that’s basically what plain language is. It’s just making sure everybody’s on the same page.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, I mean, I think between the two of us, we must have seen some incredibly poor language in contracts in our time.

Elizabeth De Stadler: Yeah, horrendous.

Tyson Ballard: Nowadays, I kind of just find them hilarious because they’re almost oxymorons and turning themselves upside down and just putting words in contracts that just don’t need to be there. But yeah, definitely a worthy cause. You’ve always struck me as someone who can take a dry topic like contracts, I think when we first met it was L-I-B-O-R and somehow make it exciting. I don’t know where you get that passion or what drives you in that way. But could you kind of talk a little bit about why it’s important to put energy behind these dry topics and, I guess muster some excitement to make things change in that area? Like, where does that stem from?

Elizabeth De Stadler: That’s a very, very good question. So, there’s a personal answer and a sort of professional answer and then there’s the spiritual answer, right?

Tyson Ballard: So, let’s start with the personal answer.

Elizabeth De Stadler: So, I mean, I’m a bit of my go-to sort of way of making life fun for myself is humour as you would have noticed. So, we coined kind of the hashtag ‘fun law,’ which has taken off a bit. It doesn’t just relate to injecting humour into serious topics. For me, it is about taking things that are very important. So firstly, understanding what is important and then making it intriguing or interesting or appealing or delightful or sometimes scary. Sometimes I amp up the fright part of it, you know, but anything I can do to get sustained attention from people, which has gotten harder and harder over the years. So, for me, it started as a way just to make the repetitive tasks in law a little bit more bearable. I was a litigation attorney in insurance law, and it was really depressing. And it started as a way of just finding meaning for me, litigation was fun. It was a bit like an extreme sport, but ultimately you got the feeling that no one is winning. I started looking at things like boilerplates, because typically, what a lot of people don’t realize is the most litigated clauses are those boilerplates, the thing at the end of the agreement, that nobody reads or redrafts or thinks about until something goes wrong. So, in time bar clauses, you can only bring a claim within a certain period or, non-variation clauses. Most litigated clauses globally, often because people are trying to find a way to say, well, we agreed on something else. And then you go, ‘Oh, time bar clause.’ And no one reads them. So, I found that I have to be a little bit outrageous. And I just basically want people to stop having to go to court. Just have relationships that last. It has economic value. If I do the consumer work, it gives people back some dignity in contracting. For me, it’s about trying to make people’s lives better. And making my life better in the process.

Tyson Ballard: No, it’s amazing. And I tip my hat to you. Like, what does the day in the life of Elizabeth look like? What’s an average day? And, I know, maybe there isn’t an average day, but what are your habits and what does a day look like?

Elizabeth De Stadler: Yeah, I’m giggling at that question because I’ve had a very, very busy couple of weeks. So, I also just like any professional and lawyers specifically, go through these times where I don’t get to have my ideal day. So, there are a couple of things that are important to me. Reading is kind of like my therapy. I try to do some reading first thing in the morning. I try to get moving. You and I both like waves and hills and things you can charge. I love that word, by the way, charging. Charging for me, so I like to get outside. I live in Cape Town, so it’s wonderful outside. So, that is something that I try to do whenever I can. My days are full and varied. Lately, I spend a lot of time training, teaching, and mentoring lawyers. So, the other thing that drives me, and again, that’s the personal reason, is to help lawyers with their mental health issues in the industry, it is absolutely rife. And it has to do with, I think, a feeling of a lack of meaning or connection to meaningful work. So, I try to help lawyers to find that again. Whether it is through teaching them how to write in ways that are compelling to their clients or their colleagues, or whether it’s one-on-one mentoring. So, I do quite a bit of that every day. I try to do a bit of writing every day. As I said, the last couple of days, I’ve been writing a returns policy for a big online retailer, which is a hell of a lot of fun. I get to spend time with people who are from other disciplines, like information designers, graphic designers and change managers. So, we’re a very eclectic little group, I call them my merry band of misfits.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, you’re a little outbid. I’ve been fortunate enough to meet a few. What about your morning rituals? Like do you have any? Are you a coffee person? Do you wake up and go for a walk? I’m interested to know what your morning rituals are.

Elizabeth De Stadler: So, I’m an introvert masquerading as an extrovert. A lot of people find this really difficult to believe. So, I recently saw a quote, which I thought, yeah, that’s true, ‘My alone time is for your safety.’ The key to my morning rituals is to spend some alone time first thing in the morning. That means getting up before my goals do. So, I normally feel that either by doing something physical, like going for a hike or going for a surf, or if I don’t feel like doing something physical that day, just sitting outside and reading a little bit first thing in the morning. I’m not big on meditation. I wish I were. I’m a bit too restless, I think. So, for me, it’s always one of those two things. And then, we have some good family time first thing in the morning. I have two children. And then, the day starts.

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Tyson Ballard: Yeah, yeah.

Elizabeth De Stadler: But that quiet time is super important.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, it’s quite interesting. Like, I am surprised to hear that you’re an introvert, but I know a few with incredibly big personalities that are the same as well. And that alone time is quite important and maybe that’s your key to keeping well, mentally as well.

Elizabeth De Stadler: It shows. Yeah. I have a couple of other things I find. I’m a huge proponent and I’m very privileged that I can do that, but I do therapy. The other thing that people find really surprising about me is that I have depression and I have had it for about a decade. But I do believe that I don’t see it as a disease really, like my psychiatrist 10 years ago told me your depression cures you, and to that, I swore at him, because I thought that’s a stupid thing to say, but I understand now, like what he meant, because I think it’s a bit of a superpower actually.

Tyson Ballard: I was just about to say it sounds like a superpower.

Elizabeth De Stadler: You have to be so careful. But all the warning signs that I get, it forces me to be mindful, which is also essential if you’re going to make really boring stuff interesting. You have to be interested in the meaning behind things. And that it’s almost a form of professional mindfulness. I go like, what makes this thing compelling? What makes a non-variation clause interesting?

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, yeah…

Elizabeth De Stadler: You’ll find it, pathologically curious.

Tyson Ballard: Excellent. I’m always really interested in either the internal conversation or the conversation you had with your partner that made you decide to become an entrepreneur. What was the tipping point? I know there’s probably some unrest in terms of your soul about kind of what you were doing in that insurance capacity and maybe not giving the best out to the world. But what was the exact point and the conversation that you had and when did you decide to kind of, you know?

Elizabeth De Stadler: Yeah, you’re making it sound deliberate.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, dive deep into it and start a business essentially.

Elizabeth De Stadler: Well, at the time when I left the big law firm, and I think this is a very common story, I was properly burnt out. So, I’m also a very, very competitive person. I found the whole setup of billable hours, and everybody’s competing to get the most billable hours or make your budget the fastest. It’s that typical thing that happens, you’ve got A type of personality in a competitive scenario. So, it wasn’t quite as considered maybe as I make it out to be. At the time I already started having this sort of inkling that there might be a better way of thinking about the law.

Not just in terms of when things go wrong, how do we litigate, it was very interesting to me, but I had this sort of restless feeling. And then I went to UCT, the University of Cape Town, and for me, a new world opened up. So even though I studied information design, the communication aspect of it and information architecture and visualization, which was always interesting to me, the world opened up for me when I started reading about behavioural economics and decision theory and how people process information. I’m obsessed with brains and why they work the way they do. So, when I read a book called Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, and shortly after that, a book called Nudge by Sunstein and Thaler, that just changed how I saw what it is to be a lawyer. And then I just started getting clients. I was teaching at the university, but I started doing some consulting work. So that was quite a soft entry into entrepreneurship. It got a bit harder after a while, but I don’t know, I like the freedom.

Tyson Ballard: What were the hard bits? Why did it get hard?

Elizabeth De Stadler: Cashflow will kill you. It has ups and downs. It was almost impossible to do on your own. I have a lot of respect for sole practitioners. I think it’s very, very hard and you have those ebbs and flows of work but it’s also very lonely. So, for me, things started changing when I stopped working just for myself as a sole practitioner and I started taking on partners and then taking on juniors. Running a business was hard initially. We’re not trained for that.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, yeah. How many years ago was this?

Elizabeth De Stadler: This was, this was sort of, yeah, 2016, 2017. We got a big client right off the bat, but then all your eggs are in one basket. So, when that project was over, we didn’t even have a website. I wasn’t on social media. I didn’t know the first thing about how to go get a client and you have a payroll and it’s going to run. So that was repeatedly jumping off a cliff and growing wings on the way down, right?

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, yeah, building the plane while you’re flying it.

Elizabeth De Stadler: Yeah, exactly. But it’s fun. For me, I get restless. So, you know, it’s nice I have the freedom to reinvent the business whenever I feel like it. Yeah.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, yeah. That’s great. Yeah, I think you’re in such a sweet spot because you definitely can pivot quite easily because your topics are quite broad. But still, I know you were heavily involved in LIBOR and things like that, which is obviously still connected to the True North that you’re talking about. You’re still able to take on interesting and varied topics under the True North umbrella, almost.Top of Form

Elizabeth De Stadler: Yeah, I mean, essentially, there’s no problem that doesn’t interest us in some way, shape or form. In that way, we’re almost more like management consultants, although that’s a bit of a swear word, I suppose. But people come to us with problems that other people couldn’t solve. And then we try and be creative and innovative by the different sort of problem-solving techniques that we bring, the different sort of design techniques that we bring. My favourite day of the month is when we have our book club because the other day, for instance, I did a whole training session with lawyers about writing, but I used quotes from a book on potty training that one of my colleagues was reading because that’s just what innovation is, right? It’s putting weird ideas together because they work.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, I can see the parallel. It’s a very simple instruction on how to go to the toilet when you’re a little kid, which essentially is probably as plain language as you potentially can get, right? So yeah, what a wonderful analogy. Yeah, I’m sure you probably had a lot of fun with that.

Elizabeth De Stadler: I don’t know if they did, but I did. And that’s all I care about.

Tyson Ballard: Well, what about if you were asked to give a TED Talk on an area that is not in your speciality or something outside of your main area, essentially, and it can’t be stealing pens, what do you think that topic would be and why?

Elizabeth De Stadler: Slime mould.

Tyson Ballard: Slime mould?

Elizabeth De Stadler: Yeah.

Tyson Ballard: Please explain.

Elizabeth De Stadler: Really? So, slime mould, it’s a single-cell organism. It’s beautiful, you can go Google it and you’ll see the most amazing images. And basically, there was this experiment many, many years ago. I think it was the city of Tokyo that wanted to optimize its travel system. And what they did, they took, and they put little slime mould like oats. They put little nodules of oats exactly the same distance apart as the big business hubs in the city, and then they dropped the slime mould in the middle, and then they watched it grow. And doing that they could plot the most efficient route. You know, and they redesigned their transport system following the patterns that were created by this single-cell organism.

Tyson Ballard: That is amazing.

Elizabeth De Stadler: It is amazing. There’s a video of it growing. It’s amazing. What I find interesting is this idea of collective intelligence, and I suppose you’d probably find slime mould fans amongst people who are developing sophisticated AI. But it’s also a nice metaphor for how people learn, hive intelligence, which I think is sort of an underutilized concept in businesses and law firms. Just figuring out how to get people to work together. It’s interesting to me. I don’t know if that would be my TED Talk. I suspect someone’s already done a TED Talk on slime mould.

Tyson Ballard: Well, I think I’m going to Google that. It’s weird, you know, like this week I interviewed Andy Wishart, the founder of Contract Express as well. And we were talking about weird hobbies. And he was talking about how he’s obsessed with laundry. I was chatting to him about it because I’ve just finished a leadership course where I was fortunate enough to be in a group with some amazing people. And one of them was the coach of the Milwaukee Bucks. And after they won the NBA, he was talking about how everyone celebrated in the streets and the team did the parade and stuff. But he went and mowed his lawn and he’s obsessed with lawn mowing. So, he listens to lawn mowing podcasts, etc. So, yeah, it’s amazing, I think you’d be happy with the terminology, how these eccentric entrepreneurs have these awesome…not just hobbies, but interests.

Elizabeth De Stadler: I’ve been called worse.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, I’m sure you have.

Elizabeth De Stadler: I think we have the ability, but again, it’s that curiosity, isn’t it?

Tyson Ballard: It’s the curiosity, isn’t it?

Elizabeth De Stadler: I’m always thinking when I’m reading something, like how can this help me with the problems that I’m seeing? I’m a big fan of analogous thinking, so thinking how is this a problem? For this problem, on this returns policy, for instance, the client asked us to benchmark with other online retailers and the returns policies were universally shit, which is a legal term.

Tyson Ballard: So, you could say that in your benchmarking study.

Elizabeth De Stadler: Yeah, it’s universally shit. If people are having better experiences with their returns at another online retailer, it’s in spite of their returns policies, not because of it.

And then suddenly, we started thinking, okay, but like reverse logistics, what else has got that sort of characteristic? So, we started benchmarking in insurance. We start benchmarking in travel. We start benchmarking anywhere that has the characteristic of I’m going to give you something back and you’re going to give me my money back. I think it helps. I think that’s why entrepreneurs are the way they are. So, they’re always looking for, oh, this thing can help me with this other thing.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, it’s interesting. I’m kind of the same as well. I mean, I read a lot as well, but you can take inspiration from anything, from watching movies, from going to a nice restaurant to checking into a hotel to reading something, listening to music, listening to lyrics even and stuff like that. So yeah, I’m exactly the same. I think our minds think very, very similar.

Elizabeth De Stadler: People think we flit between ideas, but it’s, you know, we just want to put things together.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, exactly. What about, speaking of kind of curious people and individuals, when I say the word successful, who’s the first person that comes to your mind and why?

Elizabeth De Stadler: I’ve developed an unhealthy obsession with Alex Hamilton from Radiant.

Tyson Ballard: Unhealthy obsession?

Elizabeth De Stadler: Yeah, like I think it’s a matter of time before we start a commune and we’re in a throuple or something.

Tyson Ballard: That would be an interesting commune because the last time I met Alex he was force-feeding me tequila.

Elizabeth De Stadler: I’m a bit obsessed with him and his book called Sign Here, and how he’s thinking about this topic of large language models and how we might use it to make contracting better. But I just love how his mind works. I mean, I don’t know how successful he is. He looks very successful, but I find it really interesting how he cuts to just the quick of things. Probably also because it suits me. What he had to say about large language models recently in contracting is that ultimately the thing that matters the most is that you’ve got short, clear, relevant terms, which resonate. So, I’m a big fan of these thought leaders who put in the work to think hard.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, what’s your prediction on the whole LLM space in terms of large language models and the impact on our industry?

Elizabeth De Stadler: My general philosophy to futurism goes back to Nassim Taleb who wrote Black Swan and Anti Fragile he says no one fucking knows.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah. Yeah. And if you think you know, you don’t.

Elizabeth De Stadler: No, I think there are certain characteristics that lawyers will need to remain relevant, and I try to teach people those. I think what is exciting to me is that human skills are becoming more and more important again. So, creativity, problem-solving, understanding problem-solving techniques, curiosity, resilience, adaptability to change, that it’s going to change the way we practice. I think that’s a foregone conclusion. In any given year, there are probably 20 things that will change ultimately the way we practice. AI is just the one that we focused on last year. It was frustrating, a little bit. I’m guessing for you as well because very little of what happened last year was new. And sometimes, I think like what it highlighted for me is we’re short on people who think hard, right? We’re not thinking hard like why was anybody surprised that LLMs would elucidate case law? If you asked that legal question, that’s how it works. The word probabilistic is the third word in the terms and conditions. So that’s why I’m a fan of the hard thinkers. The modern legal philosophers, you know?

Tyson Ballard: It’s a tough one, isn’t it? Because I think there’s still a place for it. But then, definitely the cognitive, deep thinking, problem-solving, it’s not there yet. If you want to reference a policy and stick a nice gooey with the chat GPT, in front of it, it says can Tyson and Elizabeth go skateboarding down a hill?

Elizabeth De Stadler: My mom says no. Like father, everybody says no.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Elizabeth De Stadler: Yeah. I mean, it has changed. It has changed my life for the better. I mean, the plain language practitioners will know. I mean, it’s made our lives easier because I can feed it a beautifully drafted set of credit card terms, a true story. And I can say, can you redraft this in the voice of Dolly Parton? Please don’t change the meaning. It’ll do that in a split second, and it’ll do a fairly good job. So, it has made certain parts of my job just much quicker, but that decision of what should be in those credit card terms. That’s the human one. Yeah, exactly. Because it’s about a relationship. And it can regurgitate a hundred shit credit card terms. But I didn’t ask you whether I’m allowed to swear on this, on this podcast. That ship has sailed.

Tyson Ballard: There’s no PG setting, unfortunately, on this one. Yeah, great. What about making mistakes? How has a failure or apparent failure set you up for success later? Do you have a favourite failure of yours?

Elizabeth De Stadler: I don’t know, like on the skateboarding topic. I mean I fell hard a couple of years ago but that turned out to be one of my favourite accidents ever. It made for some interesting thinking about what is it that attracts me to what the psychologist calls, edge work. As anybody who likes slightly dangerous sports, will identify with that line of you’re not quite safe. And why I find that exhilarating, I mean the point that I want to make about failures, I think, part of the reason why lawyers are so ill has to do with two things, one is perfectionism. This idea that in order to justify our high fees, we have to be perfect, is a problem. And then there’s this sort of, you’ve broken out of it, I’m sure, but there’s this sort of institutionalized abuse that we put our juniors through because we think it’s almost hazing what happens in law firms. You need to be tough, right? And both of those things breed this fear of failure, the fear of the second draft, the third draft, and the fourth draft, feedback becomes scary. I don’t see it like that. Like I see it all as just a giant experiment. With the people I mentor, I try and teach them to be comfortable with saying, I don’t know, and all you need to do is add the word yet. I don’t know yet. And so that’s the one sort of affirmation that I use is I don’t know yet and also freedom. Freedom to fail, freedom to suck. I’m just experimenting with this. Yeah, this iteration, this draft did not work. I’m going to try it again. It’s not a failure. I’m experimenting. I’m trying to see what works, and what doesn’t work. And when you look at studies of highly successful people, it’s not that they don’t fail, it’s that they fail more frequently and at a quicker rate than other people. I mean, you can go and look at entrepreneurs, you can go and look at artists. They just tried more. Einstein is an example. You just tried more. And moved on, try and move on.

Tyson Ballard: I listened to a lot of Alan Watts and he’s always talking about if you want to be good at something, you need to be with it. And you need to be present with it. I mean, it’s probably just like you’re saying, it’s a much longer route to success or whatever you define success as, but if you’re not having that freedom to experiment and make mistakes. I wonder if it’s kind of linked a little bit to education, like even from schooling ages where you’re either right or wrong in a test, to law school where it’s almost like a binary answer to a problem when you’re kind of researching matters or regulation and things like that. And then it all boils down to a test, which you either pass or fail and you get a law degree. And then obviously you get thrown into the deep end with the juniors trained. You have this idea in your head of what you think is right or wrong, and what is perfect and it’s quite binary, whereas it’s not like that in life, it’s much more grey.

Elizabeth De Stadler: And you’re taught that it’s bad to be wrong. My favourite, one of my favourite authors, Daniel Kahneman, is the father of behavioural economics, who won a Nobel Prize, goes by Danny Kahneman, which I find very amusing. But anyway, I think it was in an interview with Adam Grant, that Adam Grant asked him why he always looks so happy when someone proves him wrong. And Danny said it’s because at that moment I’m less wrong than before.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, it’s true.

Elizabeth De Stadler: So, I’m in the early stages of writing a book and I’ve decided to call it less wrong than before. If you can say you’re less wrong today than you were yesterday, you’re winning.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, exactly. Well, having that reflection kind of mindset, what advice would you give to your younger self? Thinking about the juniors and thinking about Elizabeth straight out of university.

Elizabeth De Stadler: Yeah, don’t take it so seriously.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, but you don’t.

Elizabeth De Stadler: I used to. I wish I didn’t get trapped quite so much in that sort of achievement mindset where you’re chasing numbers. I would not tell myself to do anything differently, because I wouldn’t be here if I did things differently. I think everything had its role in my evolution, but yeah, I would have said none of it matters quite as much as you think. And the minute you make peace with your sort of relative irrelevance, a lot of the pressure goes away. So, I think I said to someone, I’m like a mobile library, I’m making book recommendations left, right, and centre. If it’s annoying, stop me. But the book by Oliver Berkman, called 4,000 weeks. If nobody reads any of the books you and I have mentioned, I mean, 4,000 weeks I feel like it’s rewired my brain a little bit.

Tyson Ballard: Ah, okay. Well, I want to join this book club. So, I know we’ve got the guys in legal who skateboard or surf, but I feel like I’m an honorary member of the ones that steal pens from clients. And then maybe we need another one for that little book club.

Elizabeth De Stadler: Yeah, we’re starting one. We’ve called the new business Rehabilitated Lawyer. There’s definitely going to be a book club. We’ve just started, some people call it the goat company because my new obsession is goats. But that’s where we want to get stuck into understanding the reasons behind the wellness crisis in the legal industry. And I desperately, like this is my IKIGAI, my purpose in life, I want to keep the creative people in law because we need them. And at the moment, I don’t think we’re doing a good job of it to keep the innovators and the entrepreneurs and the creatives in the industry. So, I want to get stuck into that. And I think a book club will definitely help and be fun.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, absolutely. Well. I definitely think you’re in the right place by the way, like you are a hundred percent where you should be in terms of the advice to yourself.

Elizabeth De Stadler: Yeah. I’m happy.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, exactly. Well, what about a theme song? What would be your theme song?

Elizabeth De Stadler: Wow, that’s a good one. There’s a song by a South African band, I think they’re called Sunset Sweatshop or something like that. And there’s a song called ‘Coming Along’ it’s got that typical sort of South African beat, that I’m sure you’re familiar with. And it’s just such a nice song about joining a tribe or joining a movement. Are you coming along? I’ll send you a link to it. Yeah. I think it’s Sunset Sweatshop.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, great.

Elizabeth De Stadler: Yeah. So, I often play it at the end of my keynotes, because this is the thing that we also say a lot, and we’ve got stickers that say if standing up for yourself burns a bridge, I’ve got matches. We ride at dawn.

Tyson Ballard: That’s brilliant. I love it. I love it. Yeah.

Elizabeth De Stadler: I’m turning into a revolutionary.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, exactly. All right. Well, I mean, just on that note, it’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast. Thank you so much for making the time. Lots of tips and tricks, and lots of great book recommendations, so we’ll be sure to kind of make sure we highlight those in the transcript. And yeah, thanks again. Thank you. It was a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate it.

Elizabeth De Stadler: No, agreed. It’s the easiest one I’ve ever done. But as you said, we were overdue, but thanks so much for having me.

Tyson Ballard: Yeah, excellent. Thanks, Elizabeth. Cheers.