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All My Projects Are Your Projects · You've Been Heard

• 0:09
  Speaker A: All right, well, it's a pleasure to welcome you back to you've Been Heard the podcast designed for current IT leaders and next generation of tech enthusiasts looking to secure their seat at the table. Our mission is to move beyond the corporate scripts and to have real conversations about what it actually takes to lead organizations into tomorrow. I'd like to introduce today's guest, Darius Armiento. Dario, I want to start by saying a huge thank you for your time and willingness to dive into the trenches with us today to our community over at you've been heard.com you're in for a unique treat. While Dario is a seasoned CIO with over 25 years of experience currently leading the charge at Wilshire Law Firm, he brings a perspective you don't often see in the server room. He actually has a background in theology. This human centric philosophy deeply influences how he builds trust and transparency in high pressure environments. Dario, we've got a lot of stuff to talk about today around your journey from fixer to fortifier, but I'd love to start by handing off the microphone. Oh, off to you. Please introduce yourself and let us know a little about yourself.
• 1:26
  Speaker B: Yeah, great to be here. Thank you so much for having me and of being part of this community. It's new for me to be part of this community, so I was excited to hear about it and see what you all were putting together for IT leaders. So I'm honored to be a guest and participate in this. So thank you for that.
• 1:42
  Speaker A: Thank you.
• 1:43
  Speaker B: It's an interesting journey I've had over the years. I grew up in New Jersey. I was born and raised in Jersey Boy and found my way out to California after finishing four years of college. And right around the dot com boom, right? And it was around and I was trying to find work and this help desk job came up and I was like, well, I can do tech support for a little while and figure out life until.
• 2:08
  Speaker A: What was that first degree? Because the theology wasn't the first one.
• 2:13
  Speaker B: So interestingly enough, I went to four years of college and I didn't finish. I kind of bounced around from school to school. I'd been. Life was taking me in a lot of different directions and I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do. And so coming to California was part of my brothers. I have two older brothers that were living out here in California and so I sort of followed them as the dumb younger brother. You can work in la. I lived in the den for the first year here. But yeah, so I. I was actually originally chasing A degree in history and thinking that I would either go teach or go to law school. And I found this niche little market called law firms and got into a help desk just to make ends meet, to make a living.
• 2:55
  Speaker A: So that first help desk was with a law firm?
• 2:57
  Speaker B: Yeah, it was, it was okay. Yeah. And it's so kind of I thought to myself, well, if I was going to go to law school, what better place to work than a law firm and figure this out. I really didn't know a lot about the law legal industry either. So I found myself at one of the largest law firms in the world, not realizing, okay, they were over 2,000 lawyers, a worldwide presence, and at a point where law firms were typically very behind the times in tech.
• 3:28
  Speaker A: So yeah, because they very slow to adopt because they wanted to make sure of the legality of everything.
• 3:34
  Speaker B: Right. And then the worst, they didn't want to be in a situation where things don't work. So. And so it was sort of that transition time of tech too, in the early 2000s in particular. So it was 2000 when I got that job and the whole world was changing. The Internet boom. And everything was moving in the tech direction. So I would say that I was very fortunate to find myself at the right place at the right time, with the right opportunities.
• 3:59
  Speaker A: And so what happened to help get you from the help desk? Cause I mean, especially that help desk. I, I too started on the help desk around that same time. And we definitely had to have a wide knowledge base or skill set to. Cause I don't know about your help desk, but mine was whoever picked up the phone fixed whatever problem it was.
• 4:23
  Speaker B: Yeah, that was pretty much what it was. Right. It was sort of like we, we didn't really know sort of what we know today in terms of the separation of responsibilities from team to team, even in a large organization. Yes, you had your network guys, you had your engineers, and you had your programmer, and then you had your fixers. Right. The people that just kind of knew the technology. And so I kind of dove in headfirst. Right. So at the time, Microsoft's MCSE was the rage. That was the thing. Be a tech, you needed to have your mcse. And so I dove in and did that. I remember it was a one week boot camp to take all five tests.
• 5:01
  Speaker A: Yeah. And oh man, those tests.
• 5:04
  Speaker B: Yeah, those were the good old days. Right?
• 5:06
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 5:08
  Speaker B: So. But yeah, you had to kind of know a little bit about everything in order to really do the job. And it really was to your point, like you, you just kind of had to know what how to fix problems. Right.
• 5:19
  Speaker A: So back then, so many of us took one of two paths and I think the majority took the path of okay, I get to know the tech. I'll, I'll understand all the applications, I'll understand the networking, I'll understand the systems. But not very many of us talk to the users to find out why are you doing this? Okay, I understand that you have a problem and this is what the goal that you're looking for. But why help me understand?
• 5:53
  Speaker B: Most IT leaders don't have an Internet problem. They have a management problem. Multiple locations, multiple providers, multiple bills, different contracts. We help IT leaders make Internet boring again by consolidating visibility, billing support and monitoring without changing providers or forcing upgrades. If nothing needs fixing, we'll tell you that's vendor neutral advisory. Just go to you've been heard.com and answer the seven questions to simplify, streamline and save. Yeah, I agree. So for me, my initial impression of the tech and having had dove into the MCSE program and trying to be that what we used to call lovingly the propeller head guy in the back room, I knew I wasn't that. I knew there was that I would look at those guys and like that's not what I want to be doing. But I was fascinated by the business. I was particularly the law business too because that's where I was. So I sort of started to say yeah, and, and, and the people aspect. Right. Like I enjoyed interacting with people and talking to people and understanding how they ticked and what sort of motivated people. How could I get somebody to get this job done? And how could I report back statistics on help desk calls? I was diving into the numbers of the help desk calls. How many tickets are we doing? Why are we doing this many tickets? This time of day it's higher and this time of day it's lower. So we should take our breaks during that period of time. And so I started talking to lawyers and asked them why do you do this and what is this? We, we had all these different document types too. We had letters and memos and pleadings and briefs and there was all these different pieces of what they did.
• 7:35
  Speaker A: Yeah, I was going to say, you're at this point we're talking there aren't huge amounts of content management systems. There aren't. And in the transportation industry we always call them imaging systems. But content management for all of the different types of documents that you're talking about and trying to keep all of those segregated, separated, accessible only by the right People very controlled in that legal environment. And then. Yeah. So one of the primary systems, of course, would be a word processor.
• 8:08
  Speaker B: Yeah, word processor. And then a document management system. Right. And at the time, we were transitioning from Novell's file servers. Right. Into a more structured database system that had controls in place. Right. And it was sort of cutting edge stuff. Like we had not been doing this ever before, particularly at a large law firm. And so we were implementing these tools that really kind of changed the game for them. And when you're working at an international level like that too, like their work product too, is so critical to them of having access to it everywhere. And all of the time, all kinds of stories of like a lawyer needing documents in Hawaii that weren't accessible at any point and suddenly now needed to be accessible and getting them access to it. So it was such a big transition from what the world had been in the 90s into the early 2000s.
• 8:58
  Speaker A: Yeah. If they hadn't printed it up and brought it with them, there was no chance of them getting it. And now you're suddenly enabling them to access it through their laptop all wherever they are, which, I mean, today we don't even think about that. It's available to me on my desktop, on my work laptop, on my phone, all of those different places. But. Yeah. So breaking new ground there. But that also tells me you're getting away from the help desk a bit too.
• 9:29
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So I quickly found that I liked being in leadership. I wanted to lead teams. And so I sat down with my supervisor at the time and I said, look, I don't see myself being a techie in the back end and doing all that techie work. And I jokingly said to him, I said, I want your job to my help desk supervisor at the time. Talk about the ego of a 21 year old, 22 year old walking into your boss's office and saying, I want your job.
• 9:55
  Speaker A: Cool. And hopefully he helped you get there.
• 9:57
  Speaker B: He did, amazingly enough. So about six months later, he had been promoted to a manager. And he said, I think you could be the help desk supervisor and take over. Like really see, let's do it. So I moved quickly from help desk into management. And so from 21, 22 years old, I started my management journey. And so it's an interesting challenge though, because as you're learning to lead, you're also needing to learn the technology and sort of combining those skills at the same time. It's very daunting. Right, right. And I look back on it, I'm Like, I don't know why I thought I could do those things, but somehow I did.
• 10:36
  Speaker A: I was like, well, we were going to live forever, so why not this, all of these impossible tasks. Just take it as it comes.
• 10:42
  Speaker B: Yeah. So I started my journey in the management side of things early on and sort of never went back. I was like, all right, I'm just going to continue to grow my career on the management side and learn tech along the way. There were certainly a lot of stronger techs than me that just didn't have the leadership skills. And so I found that they probably
• 11:03
  Speaker A: didn't want to be leaders either.
• 11:05
  Speaker B: They didn't want to have to go and sit and explain to the business owners, the other business leaders, why we do things or how we do things, or justify. They just wanted to work on the.
• 11:16
  Speaker A: Yep. The two paths.
• 11:19
  Speaker B: Correct. Yeah. So I ended up understand. Learning to understand the. Their world and be able to translate that into tech speak. This is what they're asking, right.
• 11:28
  Speaker A: This is what.
• 11:28
  Speaker B: And this is why it's important, because it's like, well, it works well. This is why that's inefficient for them.
• 11:34
  Speaker A: And so go through this, do that growth, start getting that experience. I believe you went back for another degree or finalized that first degree or.
• 11:44
  Speaker B: Yeah. So I was an interesting crossroads in my life. I had been in management, My career was already working and I was doing the things that I wanted to do. But I found myself in my personal life sort of waning and wanting for more out of my life and having success at a young age in the IT world, in the legal world, it sort of. It provided, but it didn't answer questions for me. And so I had all this good technical knowledge, I had all this good leadership knowledge, but I really didn't know how to use it in the right way. And so when I started to frame it and all of these amazing leadership books that I read over the years, from everything from good to great to how to win friends and influence people, to what they didn't teach you in Harvard Business School. There's all these amazing books at the time. And my life started sort of to uncover some things in my workplace that was like, wow, I'm here now to serve the people. I remember starting early in my career, particularly as a leader, where, you know, the pyramid was like, the leader's on top. Like, you're at the top, you lead and you lead down the pyramid, where the leader is actually at the bottom of the pyramid and is supposed to be the support mechanism for his teams. And so I remember early on saying to myself, why are my team not following through with what I'm asking of them? And I started to have this sudden realization in leadership that it's because I'm not understanding what they want, I'm not connecting to them. I'm too busy telling them what they want needs to get done, rather than listening to them and having a relationship with them and starting to understand what drives them, what motivates them, what are they getting out of this? They're here for a reason. Not just to get a paycheck, but to have an experience and to build relationships. Because that's really ultimately what our life's about, is about relationship. And tech enables that, which is where. That sort of crossroads of why do I do tech when I really have studied and spent a lot of time in the theological aspect of life? Because I just keep bringing it back into what is life really about. Tech enables that connection.
• 13:47
  Speaker A: I have to admit that this is one of the first conversations, and I've probably done 30 or 40 of these conversations at least, where we've kind of turned that. Actually, I'm not even going to claim any of the credit for this, where you've turned that conversation around. And instead of it being, do I become a tech leader in an organization? How do I become a leader of tech and how do I serve the organization? How do I serve those that work for me or those that work around me? I personally feel what you're talking about deep in my soul. I've felt that upside down triangle for a while and that constantly try to keep myself from saying those that work for me to my coworkers because I work with them and I have certain experiences, I have certain talents and capabilities. Now how do I help them to achieve their goals and how do I help all of us to achieve the goals of the organization?
• 14:52
  Speaker B: And I think that's the responsibility, particularly in it. Right. Because we touch so much of the business. Right. There's not. I joined Wilshire, there's a couple of
• 15:01
  Speaker A: departments that do it besides us, but go ahead.
• 15:05
  Speaker B: That's true. But not in the same way. Not, not in the same way that we do. And I'll let me qualify that. So I started this job about five months ago. I joined Wilshire Law Firm about five months ago. And in the first week they have a quarter or a bi weekly team meeting of the executive leadership team to talk about goals and what each team is working on. And then quarterly they also do this meeting of like, okay, we're Setting our goals for the quarter and each team. And I was one of the last ones to go because I was new also. So they were going around the room and they were talking about this project, that project, that project, and every team and being the new guy. And when it got to me, I was like, well, it seems like all of my projects are all of your projects, so just add me to all of your projects because those are the projects that I'm going to be working on, like beyond that and every part of the organization. And I qualified it in this way. And this is why, yes, other teams also interact in a unique way to all the departments, but not like we do. We are integrated into their workflows. We have to have an understanding of how a marketing team works. What's the workflow of marketing? We have to understand the workflow of hr, how users are interacting with their systems. We have to have an understanding of talent acquisition and recruiting and their workflows to help them build systems that will connect those things. We have to have an understanding of the law practice, for me, of how a case is managed and how a case goes from inception to closed. Right. We have to have an understanding of facilities, how mail moves from entry to delivery, how the phone systems work, how reception works, what's their workflow. No other part of the organization has that much intimacy with every team.
• 16:49
  Speaker A: Agree. Completely agree. Because of the hr. Yes. They touch every department, because they help staff every department and they go across the whole organization. But you ask HR exactly how the mail moves or what at the facility, they may be able to give you the job descriptions and the name of the person, but how that person interacts with everything, even those users or those co workers that we typically don't think of as being tech savvy or tech users, like mechanics, like truck drivers, in my realm, they're in there too. They're a huge part of all of those workflows.
• 17:28
  Speaker B: Right, Exactly. And so it creates that more of, to back to the original point of like that servant leadership. Right. Of I'm here to serve the organization. Right? I'm here to serve the organizations, serve the leadership, serve my team, serve the workflows, serve all of these different pieces. And I think far too often we want to demand things rather than support things. And so if we shift our mindset into that servant attitude, things start to become a little bit clearer. Right. And I like to tell my team, like, my job is to get the rocks and obstacles out of your way. My goal and my job is to make sure that you have the resources you need to achieve the things that need to be done. So tell me what those are. Do you need training? Let's build a training plan. There's a person that's in the way. Well, then I will go smooth the edges around that person to help get you the results that you need. And I think in growing into leadership, particularly around it, is building those relationships with the individuals of understanding what their needs are, understanding what their goals are, understanding the greater picture, and then helping our teams to deliver those results.
• 18:39
  Speaker A: So this evolution that you enter and that growth and evolution and the teams not doing what you were asking, by the time that you've gone through this evolution, has the framework of the discussion with the teams changed, or was this now part of the challenge in trying to incorporate that servant leadership into that and change the discussion with the teams?
• 19:08
  Speaker B: At that point, I. I kind of reengaged in my education, my late 20s, early 30s, finished it up, and then I immediately went into a master's program in theological studies because I was like, well, I just want to keep learning. I just want to keep chasing after more knowledge around this stuff. And so again, I don't know what I thought I was doing to myself at the time. I like thinking that I could achieve all of those things. And. And I, I did. And were there losses in some area? Yeah, I think one of the areas that I lost myself in was I'm not good at. I'm not good at taking care of myself and my own personal needs because I'm so focused in on doing the things for others and sort of staying focused on that.
• 19:48
  Speaker A: I've gone through a lot of that, too. I've just gotten to a point in my life now where I'm like, no, I'm taking time.
• 19:54
  Speaker B: Yes, exactly.
• 19:55
  Speaker A: It's okay for me to take time.
• 19:58
  Speaker B: And I think too, once we're in leadership, it's like we're always on. We always have to be available because the next thing might break, that we need to help get resolved or get the right, you know, resources in place to fix. So self care is part of that leadership journey that in the last few years, I've finally figured out a little bit better. I'm not saying I know what it looks like now.
• 20:17
  Speaker A: At least you know what it looks like.
• 20:18
  Speaker B: Yeah. But going back to the incorporation of it, it became a very odd transition in my life to start to navigate these conversations in different ways, and people started noticing something different. And I noticed that they noticed when they stopped and said, you seem so much calmer about things like, how is it that you're always like Zen when you're in these difficult meetings, that you don't seem to get worked up and riled up. And that's kind of when I saw that, oh, there's a real shift in who I am now. But it took a very, like, it probably was a three, four year period where my conversations with people started to change and I started to ask them more questions rather than tell them things. And I just started being more curious about their lives. And I said, well, tell me about your personal life. Tell me what's going on in your personal world. Because so often we were taught, I don't know, maybe our age generation, whatever, you check your luggage at the door, right? When you come into work. Work is work. You don't bring your personal life in, right?
• 21:13
  Speaker A: Yes. It's always. It's still playing inside my head, right.
• 21:17
  Speaker B: And I knew what I had gone through in that part of my career, in my personal life, right. I knew that I was going through so many challenges and I was like, I can't be alone going through these things. Other people must be going through these things too. And so they're bringing their stuff and even though we're supposed to check it at the door, they're still carrying it on the back, like in the back of their mind. So I started investing more in people and talking to them and asking them questions. How are things going? How are your kids doing? What are your big plans? Like, what's your goals in life? Like, what do you really want to be doing? Like, if you had it, unlimited money, like, what would you be doing? I started asking questions like that and people started opening up and telling me and sharing with me more and more about their lives and their perspective of me started changing because I stopped being the guy that told them what to do to the guy that cared about them, that started asking him and engaging them and building relationship with them and working with them and saying, hey, I tried this, or hey, I tried that, or in personal crises, right? Just knowing that I was an ear that they could trust and listen. And I can relate to people that have gone through loss, going through just the daily struggles of life. That's what we deal with every day. That's where the relationship stuff became so much more apparent to me and it made me a better leader because I said at the beginning of this is like, I really was curious about the people, what makes them tick, what, what motivates them, how do I get them to do achieve great things and Suddenly, like, the swing started to go in that direction. And I started investing more in their professional development and seeing them grow and seeing them develop. And I've seen amazing things. And I started to get more out of my job by investing in them. Cause I now was feeling the satisfaction of seeing other people grow and develop and become greater than they ever experienced. I remember one guy I started the journey with along the way, he came to me and he said, I think I'm going to quit my job and I'm going to go be a bus driver. And I looked, and he was working in the records department and just a records clerk. But I had seen something in him that was unique. Like, I was like, no, there's more for you. And I'm like, you need to buckle down. And so I sat with him. I said, look, you have a spark in you. There's something special in you that you're not allowing to grow and develop. And he'd actually handed in his resignation. And I turned him. I said, you need to go take that back. Like, legitimately, like, you need to go take that letter back. And for whatever reason, because we had been going through this journey together and talking through things, he's like, okay, fine. So he took Dax resignation. Within three weeks, he was promoted to a supervisory position. And he's like, I had no idea that this. That they were going to do this. I was like, neither did I. I'm like, that's pretty amazing. Like, you're now the supervisor. Right. And they gave him, like, a $20,000 raise. He's like, that's more than, like, the other job was gonna pay me. He's like, I don't have to work a second job. I can work just this job. I'm like, that's awesome. Here we are. This is probably 15 years later. He is now the west coast director of records management for one of the largest law firms in the world.
• 24:20
  Speaker A: And. And he almost walked away from it. And you helped redirect that.
• 24:25
  Speaker B: This is what we're supposed to do. We're supposed to care for each other, we're supposed to look out for each other. And. And yes, the tech is cool and it's fun to do it, but leadership, true leadership. Right. That to me, that was the evidence of true leadership.
• 24:40
  Speaker A: Yeah. Because the upside down triangle really symbolizes to me that servant leadership aspects of this. So as you were working on that master's. And I'm going to make an assumption here that the law firms or whoever you were working for at the time probably looked at that and said this isn't really relevant to your job, so you're not getting reimbursed for this education. Whereas while you're working on your mcse, I'm pretty sure they paid for that, paid for the test and helped you get that. I'm assuming that there were some challenges around all of this and still trying to. I get it and I see how. But was there true thought in or was it just a journey of I'm interested in this, I like doing that. And now because I fed both sides, now I'm a blender or homogeneous person doing these things or was your journey into the masters and were you thinking about that at. As part of your technology.
• 25:47
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 25:47
  Speaker A: Or as your leadership growth.
• 25:50
  Speaker B: So from the tech. I'll get to the tech perspective on that, but I want to touch on it a little bit because you, you, you raise a good point because yes, my job day would not reimburse me for my schooling in this area. So it was a personal journey on my, on that side of the house was. It was a personal journey that I felt like I needed to continue on with the master's program and how it was influencing my personal life, my business life. Right. And my social life and the changes that were taking place here. But it was an interesting. Actually at my first CIO interview, the COO who was interviewing me said he went through my resume and he's like, wow, you've worked some for some really great firms, law firms. Because I was in the big law for many years. I did 20 years at large international law firms and going to this 650 person accounting firm. But the COO was a former lawyer, so he knew all of the law firms that I worked for. And he's like, there's not a lot of people with your pedigree in terms of law firms. I was like, no, there's not. I said, I've just been very fortunate that I worked for the top five largest law firms and most prestigious law firms in my career. So. Well, I have a couple of different directions I want to go with this, but I'm going to stick to the actual technology itself. Oh, AI, right.
• 27:07
  Speaker A: Yeah. Oh, by all means, let's dive into that part of the journey. Yes.
• 27:14
  Speaker B: It's hard to not have a tech conversation without talking AI these days. Right?
• 27:18
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 27:18
  Speaker B: And so the core of it ultimately becomes around integrity. Right. What are you using it. Why are you using.
• 27:24
  Speaker A: Right.
• 27:25
  Speaker B: And so I've had to speak on AI often, particularly the last couple of years. I've done a Couple of speaking engagements. And I kind of use this analogy around AI. AI is a tool. Like a hammer is a tool. Right. And a hammer has a purpose. Right. And you have different types of hammers, right? You have a framing hammer, you have a mallet, you have a sledgehammer. Right. Each one of them have different purposes. And you wouldn't use a sledgehammer to do the job of a hammer because you're going to break it. Right. Or a mallet, right. You take a sledgehammer to where you need a mallet, like you're going to break it. Right. There's reasons of purpose. Could you use it? Sure.
• 28:05
  Speaker A: So it's going to make the job exponentially harder.
• 28:08
  Speaker B: And so that's where the conversation around it. And you have to know how to use the tool.
• 28:12
  Speaker A: Right.
• 28:12
  Speaker B: You have to know. Because if you try to swing a sledgehammer in the wrong way, you ain't gonna hurt yourself.
• 28:20
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 28:20
  Speaker B: You get what I'm saying? So I like to use these analogies because I think it's important because it gives people a perspective. And AI is the same, Right. There are AI tools that exist. And then let's forget about the fact that AI has been around for over 40 years. And I've worked with guys that have been working on AI for over 40 years. And so it's not new, it's just now consumerized, just like the iPhone, consumerized mobile technology, just like Apple Music, consumerized the music industry. Like all of those things. Right. And so around the technologies, we just have to understand how we use it, why we use it, and teach people how to use it. When we first started in this on help desk, it's because nobody taught other people how to use this tech. Somehow you and I, we figured it out or somebody taught us and so we just needed to share that with others.
• 29:08
  Speaker A: Right. One of my fundamental tenets was that that day that I recognized or. Or unlearned something that I had from my childhood of don't touch that. The day that I recognized there's a button there. They made that button for a reason. Find out what that button does. Figure it out. Read the manual if you. If you want to make sure what it does before you click it it. Otherwise click it and find out.
• 29:34
  Speaker B: Yeah, doesn't hurt to try. Like if you don't try, you're not going to make progress.
• 29:40
  Speaker A: Yeah. And what's going to be happening in 18 months? What do you predict that's going to be happening in 18 months? Or that we're going to be talking about? As technology leaders in 18 months that we're not talking about today.
• 29:55
  Speaker B: Oh, I think 18 months from now, we're going to start to. The conversation is going to be around AI, right? And development tools, right? Yeah. And I think just the nature of the conversation changes, and I'm starting to see it creep into my conversations today. Well, let's just build that app. Let's just build things. Let's just build it and, like, just use AI. I'm like, oh, all right. AI is not the solution for everything. But what I'm seeing is that those solutions are starting to become more available to the consumer more quickly. I just had a marketing person build an app that solved the problem. And I was like, how did you do that? And he showed it to me and he basically just used Claude. He used an AI tool to build it and implement it. And I was like this other data analyst come in and started to show me some of the things they built with AI. And our development is going to change. Right. And the people that are doing development are going to change. And so it's going to become more consumerized. And as IT professionals, as IT leaders, we need to be prepared for this onslaught of smart people that are now taking smart tools and using them for good, that are going to create problems for it. Because security, because data, because training.
• 31:15
  Speaker A: Yeah. And let me throw a couple others, because I've been fighting this. I end up fighting. But I've been learning around this whole thing, too. Scalability, enhanceability, or that's even a wrong way of describing it. But we're going to continue to develop and grow whatever this is, whatever they bring to us.
• 31:37
  Speaker B: And the challenge to it then also becomes ip, right. Intellectual property, who owns it? Because I've already had a conversation with an AI solutions engineer that I'm about to hire, and he's like, I built this. This is my product.
• 31:52
  Speaker A: Yeah. And this was one of the things that you working at legal firms and having some of that aspect of it, you used a tool that crafted that code and the uniqueness of the code that you've crafted, you don't see it. You don't have that anymore. You did not write that chunk. So how do you own that?
• 32:15
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 32:15
  Speaker A: And do they own it? I see a lot of that. Yeah.
• 32:19
  Speaker B: We're providing the licensing for it. You're working on our laptop and the firm laptop you're working on. So there are all kinds of aspects about it, but that's a throwback to the development days of the late 90s, early 2000s. Right. Where people were writing special Excel macros or word add ons and such that sort. I like to say that we are constantly recycling stuff, challenges the IT world.
• 32:43
  Speaker A: Okay, I see that. Recycle that bin. Fill it up. Oh, great conversation, Dario. I truly appreciate your time. I truly appreciate your honesty and your integrity. And thank you for bringing that to the you've been heard community. We truly appreciate your time. Thank you.
• 33:06
  Speaker B: Thank you so much for hosting me, for doing this with me. It's a wonderful conversation.