Earlier this month, Steno Director of Legal Solutions Joe Stephens joined David Cowen’s Careers and Business of Law podcast during the CLOC Global Institute in Chicago. The discussion centered on a question that keeps surfacing in 2026: if you could automate everything, where would you stop?

Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

The thread running through the conversation is one Steno takes seriously: the difference between service and hospitality. Joe drew on Will Guidara's Unreasonable Hospitality to frame the distinction. Service, he said, is the delivery of a commodity, while hospitality is how it makes you feel. Guidara's thesis is that when you get the experience right rather than just the transaction, clients notice, and competitors can't easily replicate it. In a moment when AI is compressing timelines and raising the floor on what any competent legal professional can produce, that distinction is becoming harder to ignore and more valuable to get right.

On the automation question, Joe resisted the obvious answer. It's not the mundane tasks he most wants to fix, it's the pace. "I work at too fast a pace," he said. "If I could slow that down, how would that feel?"

This frustration is one a lot of legal professionals recognize: calm is accessible, but it doesn't hold. You carve out space for it and then get thrown back in at five times the speed. The AI dividend—all this time technology is supposed to be returning to us—doesn't automatically solve for that. What you do with the time is a separate, harder question.

Joe mentioned 4'33", a piece by avant-garde composer John Cage that instructs performers not to play their instruments for four and a half minutes, forcing audiences to sit with ambient noise instead of the music they were expecting. According to Joe, this type of slow thinking—the kind that happens with a pen, not a keyboard—is something the current pace of legal tech makes almost impossible to preserve.

Joe listed some strategies he uses to slow himself down. He carries his grandfather's gold Cross pen. He reads with paper. He became a sommelier partly because the practice demands the kind of unhurried attention that the rest of his professional life resists and helps him answer the AI dividend question: given that technology is giving time back, what are you actually doing with it?

In his role as law professor, Joe tells his students that two things matter more than anything else right now: the ability to listen and curiosity. "When people feel heard, I think that's another form of kindness,” he said. And curiosity, in his framing, is the force multiplier—the thing that turns listening into something generative. It's also, he argued, the root of both good sales and just being a good person.

Careers and the Business of Law with David Cowen is a podcast series for legal professionals at every stage, from law students to seasoned veterans. David and his guests explore career journeys, emerging technologies, legal operations, and leadership strategies.

Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.