Yotam Ottolenghi, Jamie Oliver and legal ops. What?

We recently hosted a dinner party at home and I ambitiously decided to cook four Ottolenghi dishes for the occasion (including this delight: https://ottolenghi.co.uk/recipes/roasted-chicken-legs-with-dates-olives-and-capers). In case you don’t know of Yotam Ottolenghi, he is a highly regarded Israeli chef, now based in London. He has published many recipes, which are delicious and fresh, but characterized by long lists of ingredients. Making his recipes doesn’t look difficult, but there are so many ingredients to be sourced, chopped, and blended that it becomes quite time-consuming. Another characteristic is his use of unusual ingredients like nigella seeds, urfa chilli flakes, and za’atar.

Cooking for the dinner took most of the day, including time spent searching the less traveled shelves of the local supermarket for ingredients I’d never heard of, and I was pretty footsore from standing at the kitchen bench come 6.30. I hadn’t expected to devote a whole Saturday to this.

If instead, I had chosen some Jamie Oliver recipes, which are designed to be cooked quickly with minimal ingredients, I could have spent most of the Saturday doing what I normally do on Saturdays. Anyway, I didn’t regret my choice, the food was excellent, but the moral is: choose the level of complexity you can live with.

In legal ops the complex option might mean wanting to solve all of your problems in the first iteration, for example installing point solutions for matter management, contract management, and triage. If you can digest a big meal straight up, well and good, but your colleagues may well not be as hungry for digital transformation. Also, it inevitably takes longer to put multiple complex systems into production.

It’s sometimes more sensible to start off with a Jamie-type option, nourishing and tasty, but readily achievable. If a system can deliver 80% of your wish list with 20% of the effort and cost, you can start getting some early wins and also reframe your department’s thinking ready to accept the next stages.

Legal visionaries should be mindful that, in our experience anyway, a majority of lawyers are later adopters of technology. Some are reluctant to change how they work, and the greater the complexity of the changes the harder the change management task.

So how did my dinner party go? Not well. At 8 pm, with no guests in sight, we discovered that we were a week out on the date. The food was delicious and there was a lot of it, but there was no one to share it with. I suppose the tech equivalent would be: we deployed a great system but the change management effort failed and the system was never properly used.

There is a final moral to this story, the next week I cooked from Jamie, not Ottolenghi.