Innovation Leader Monet Fauntleroy Blends the Rational With the Magical

In our Innovation Spotlight series, we interview innovation leaders about how they approach their jobs and how they’ve implemented and deployed Harvey.

In this edition, we chat with Monet Fauntleroy, Managing Director of Practice Client Services and Innovation at Winston & Strawn.

Monet shapes the firm’s legal technology, digital experience, and data science initiatives. She guides AI strategy as a member of the firm’s AI Steering Committee and driver of new platforms, bringing clarity to complexity by breaking down technical concepts for non-technical audiences. With over 15 years of experience in legaltech across top AmLaw100 firms, Monet has been recognized for cultivating a culture of collaboration, curiosity, and continuous improvement.

I call myself a member of the “considerati.” We’re people who take the act of consideration very seriously. (Yes, I made up that word, but that’s innovation!)

In all seriousness, I was raised to “consider” things very intentionally. My parents constantly reminded us to “consider the source” and “consider the consequences.” Most importantly, they taught us to “consider silence” and just listen.

To me, “innovation” means “creative consideration.” As innovation leaders, our job is to consider all the possible and impossible ways. All innovations have implications, good and bad, so we have to consider each innovation with thoughtful reflection. It is hard work to “consider.” It takes significant time and resources to “consider.”

Ultimately, innovation means having the imagination, sensitivity, and bravery to say, “Have you considered…?” in situations where it’s not easy to do so. In fact, the times when it’s not easy to ask that question are the times when it is most important to.

I’m absolutely, extremely passionate about music.

I play piano and have been a vocalist in almost every type of group and on every type of song. I used to DJ, and even played the clarinet all the way through college). Singing is still the thing that makes me the happiest. Creating and performing music has helped me learn to connect with the various audiences I encounter in my professional life.

My fellow innovation leaders and I are privileged to be doing some of the most interesting and challenging work in the legal industry and professional services.

I’m most excited about the daily opportunity to blend the rational with the magical. We blend, “We have always…” with “What if we…?” We get to look beyond the status quo and imagine different and better ways to do things.

I also get excited about the people. Innovation teams always have such fascinating members. Discussions with my teammates and other innovation “doers” are deeply enriching and inspiring.

We’ve been working with Harvey because of the platform’s broad applicability and its capacity to support a wide range of use cases with consistent effectiveness. We want to empower as many people as possible within Winston & Strawn with the ability to leverage GenAI to do their best work. Harvey is integral to that mission.

We are seeing the most adoption among deal teams and litigators. Our larger offices have higher adoption rates. The usage among business development professionals has been a welcome surprise, along with the growing popularity of Vault.

Coaching has proved to be the most effective. We start with a training that introduces Harvey and its features, but we go far beyond that. Our goal is to fully enable people to know when to use Harvey and how to maximize its impact.

This isn’t particularly novel. Coaching is inherent in change management frameworks, such as Prosci ADKAR Model (Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement) and the McKinsey 7-S Framework (Style, Skills, Systems, Structure, Staff, Strategy, and Shared Values). But to go past a one-off or time-bound training requires a much bigger investment and much more work.

By volume, Harvey’s summary capabilities make the most impact. Sifting through a massive amount of information has always been a primary hurdle in legal analysis. Harvey is a game changer for efficacy and completeness, and helps our lawyers get to insight faster.

The other two incredibly impactful use cases are drafting and draft refinement. With Harvey, the ability to find the “perfect” form or template is no longer a requirement just to get started. Our attorneys can now react to something and then iterate to the best version of a draft rather than get bogged down at the start of the drafting process.

I’ve heard two inspiring takes on “the most important step” a person can take that really nail Harvey’s impact. Some people believe the first step is the most important. Author Brandon Sanderson in his book “Oathbringer” says, “It’s the next one.”

Both the first step and the next one are really difficult in drafting, especially under pressure and time constraints, and especially when you have a lot of other work and priorities to manage. Harvey turbocharges our attorneys’ ability to take that first step so they can figure out and execute the next one.

Success is when GenAI has enabled our people to work to their highest and best purpose in their role, and that elevates our already excellent service in turn.

To that end, we track a combination of qualitative and quantitative metrics that paint a full picture of Harvey’s first- and second-order impact:

First and foremost is to communicate, early and often, about the breadth and depth of the work required to thoughtfully deploy GenAI solutions. Setting the right expectations is crucial to future success.

Compliance work, data work, internal and external messaging work are all crucial parts of a healthy GenAI program as well. They’re not add-ons, or nice-to-haves. They’re the scaffolding that make a successful rollout possible. They’re tough work. But as difficult as it is for people to envision and appreciate these components when they’re waiting to see all the amazing outcomes of a GenAI solution, you have to get people as invested in these foundations as they are in the GenAI applications themselves.

A colleague in leadership and I recently talked about how a GenAI rollout is like summiting Mount Everest. Climbers spend most of their time getting to base camp, then the camp after that, then the camp after that, before they finally start the ascent to the peak. This “summit push” is a relatively small part of the overall Everest expedition. Much of the foundational work for GenAI will be spent at base camp and on acclimation, both very important ways to spend time when you’re aiming for the top.

First, GenAI will empower people to be much more effective than they currently are.

Second, GenAI will make the uniquely human aspects of the legal industry even more important. Efficiency gains and summaries and drafting help are fantastic, but there’s so much GenAI should not and cannot replace: Empathy, personal integrity, cultural sensitivity, intuition, persuasion, the development of new legal theories, interpreting ambiguity, relationship-building, moral reasoning. Listen to Bjork’s “Human Behaviour”…she sings the perfect explanation.