David: Hello and welcome to another episode of Bangkok Thought Leaders. Today I’m here with a very special guest, a good friend of mine, Zac Robinson of Tilleke & Gibbins. Zac is the Director of Business Development for Tilleke & Gibbins, which is Thailand’s oldest and largest independent law firm. Good morning, Zac.

Zac Robinson: Morning, David. Thank you very much for that very kind introduction.

David: My pleasure. So Zac, before we get started, congratulations on your new role.

Zac Robinson: Oh, thank you. Thanks.

David: You deserve it.

Zac Robinson: Thank you. I’m glad you think so. That’s very much appreciated.

David: Why don’t you tell the folks at home a little bit about the role that you play with Tilleke?

Zac Robinson: Sure, absolutely. So as Director of Business Development at Tilleke & Gibbins, I have sort of two sides. I have an internal-facing role and an external-facing role. Externally, I cover our brand, how we appear to the world, how we engage with the businesses that need legal services within Thailand and across Southeast Asia. Internally, I act as the voice of the client within the firm. So a big part of my role is effectively acting as a translator between legal practitioners and the business people that need those legal services, making sure that we’re offering them the things that they actually need, rather than just black letter law read from lengthy legislation, which they could do themselves.

David: So like you and I have spent multiple hours off camera talking about the importance of brand and storytelling for pleasure. That’s what we do in our free time. We’re very cool people. But I think still, for many, especially for the B2B sector, when you think of brand, people often just think about a logo. Why is that not the case?

Zac Robinson: So a brand really is a company’s personality. This is more than just that first thing that you see or that first thing that you think of. It’s everything that underpins that as well. So if you think about, for example, Pepsi, that logo might be the first thing that comes to your mind, but actually there’s all kinds of other things associated with it as well. And that really is what the art of branding is all about. It’s how the world perceives your company and the people that work in your company, crucially. Good branding means that when you meet somebody from that company, you know who they are, you know what their values are, you know what they represent, and most importantly, you know the quality of the service that they’re going to offer you, which is much more than just slapping a logo on it.

David: Indeed, indeed. Well, let me pivot temporarily, but I think all of those lessons are also essential for personal branding. Obviously, this series is about people who have strong personal brands, they’re thought leaders in Bangkok, and I think that you certainly have that. You are somebody, when we walk into a room, we know the Zac Robinson story.

Zac Robinson: Absolutely.

David: We know what you’re representing, we know who you are. That’s a brand that you’ve been able to achieve without the logo.

Zac Robinson: Thank you. Although, well, I think the logo is the haircut. I think that’s instantly recognizable.

David: But as a keen student of brand and brand storytelling, you got an enviable opportunity to spend a couple of years going through the whole rebranding process with Tilleke. What was that like?

Zac Robinson: It was interesting. It was a very complex process. So full disclosure, for those who are watching who don’t know me, I started life as a lawyer, so moving into the branding side of things is polar opposite worlds colliding. And I’ve always loved that marketing side of things, but rebranding a law firm is the creative in the extreme meeting the practical in the extreme, and those two things are very difficult to marry up. So that adds an extra level of complexity to rebranding in my industry. That said, overwhelmingly I would say rebranding the firm was fun. It was a really great opportunity to explore what makes Tilleke & Gibbins what it is, what makes our people who we are, and how to visually represent that in a very quick and identifiable way. And it’s something that, you know, this isn’t our first brand. We are 130 years old, as you mentioned, we’re the oldest. So it certainly isn’t the first time we’ve done it. But if anything, that makes it more complex. We’ve got layers and layers and layers, years of this story to tell and to visually represent in an easily digestible way. Complex, but fun.

David: Okay, that’s a good tagline. Could be your personal brand.

Zac Robinson: Absolutely, yeah. I don’t think anyone’s ever called the legal industry complex, but fun before.

David: But it works. So you mentioned 130 years of different types of, probably I would imagine, various Pantones and 130 years of conflicting documents. What was the genesis of the rebrand? What was it that brought you to the stage where you thought we need to unify?

Zac Robinson: Sure. So we last rebranded the firm, I think, 12 or 13 years ago. And really the simplest answer to your question is time. In 12 to 13 years, the firm had changed an incredible amount. Twelve years ago, we had two offices in two jurisdictions. Now we have seven offices in six jurisdictions. We went from being focused on a few core practice areas to being really full service across multiple industries. And crucially, the old brand was just starting to feel a little bit old-fashioned. It represented who we were, not who we are, and most importantly, not who we are going to be for the next 10 years. So yeah, it needed doing.

David: All right. So I think the idea of when you describe it’s fun and complex, I think many people would think, okay, let’s do it, let’s rebrand. What were some of the challenges that you faced?

Zac Robinson: Oh sure. So we did it during a global pandemic. I would advise against that. There’s a lot of challenges inherent in a rebrand, particularly a multi-jurisdictional rebrand. When we were thinking about what should be really basic things like sourcing printers for new materials and things like that, we had to do it in six different countries with all these different sets of complexities. We have an office in Myanmar, an office in Laos. Sourcing suppliers there is a very different concept to doing it here in Bangkok, where we have a much more established set of industries on that. That being said, I think the key challenge comes back to what I said earlier about law firm and marketing being totally different worlds. Everything we did was a balance of that legal practicality. We had 27, well, at the time of the rebrand we had 27 partners, we now have 32. Everything goes through 27 stakeholders. That’s a huge challenge. When you have 27 decision-makers, that’s a big challenge. Burden is the wrong word, an exciting challenge. So that’s always the difficulty with law firm rebranding, balancing legal practitioner interest with the creative interest. And I think I did okay with it, and I think the end product is a good compromise, which is not an easy thing to achieve.

David: Well, we had a tiny role within all of that, and actually you were very valuable. I can say that from our side.

Zac Robinson: Thank you.

David: It’s really essential on those kind of projects to have, you describe yourself as a translator, which is a very humble way to describe it, but it’s really important because it’s not just for, obviously law firms are more complex, but any complex project like that, you’re going to have numerous stakeholders who have an opinion on it, but they have an opinion without necessarily the technical knowledge to give that opinion. So like, okay, we like blue. It’s good that you like blue, but how does it represent the brand?

Zac Robinson: Absolutely.

David: So I think that’s certainly a solid project owner on the client side, as well as a solid timeline, makes it efficient. And I think you were very lucky to have you with that knowledge to make it so smooth and so beautiful. Congratulations.

Zac Robinson: Oh well, thank you. And yeah, I absolutely agree. Well, I absolutely agree that obviously I was very valuable. But no, I absolutely agree that bridge is sometimes very necessary because it’s very strong personalities, and that doesn’t just apply to the legal industry. I think that’s true of all professional services. You don’t end up as a professional services leader without a strong personality, without being able to represent yourself in a way that gets what you want. And sometimes, as you say, without the technical knowledge on the other side of that, that just leads a project to collapse. So yeah, I fully agree. And I never call myself a project manager, but having someone to project manage and act as that translator between the two sides who understands both is key.

David: Yeah. So you mentioned the challenges of rebranding during a pandemic, hopefully a once in a lifetime issue, but what were some of the other challenges that you faced as an organization during the pandemic?

Zac Robinson: Sure, okay. So obviously, like everybody, we had to adapt very quickly to working from home. We were in a fairly good position to do that from the technical side. In the early days of the pandemic, everybody was panicking, saying how do we do this on Teams, how do we speak to our junior team members, things like that. Because of the nature of our business, that seamless operation between offices, we were already working with each other remotely to some degree, so we had a bit of a head start there. From my perspective, in addition to my role on the business development side, I’m also co-chair of what we call our DEIW, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Well-being Committee. And so that’s where we started to face real challenges. That’s an area where we traditionally performed extremely well. We’ve got 19 employer of choice awards. We were a very inclusive firm. When everybody’s working from home, all of a sudden you can’t treat everybody according to their individual needs in the same way because they’re just a face on a screen. And for the first few months that was all about the pressures of working life. It was how do we stop ourselves working 16 hours a day, going to sleep, waking up, doing it again. After a while that started to become, how do we balance people’s individual work lives and individual personal lives without it becoming soulless, without it becoming a clock in, clock out. And that was a big challenge, and that’s something we had to pivot to as firm leaders, not just as lawyers, not just as professionals, but as people who look after people. So that was, I think, the biggest challenge that we faced, and I think we rose to it quite well. But like everybody, it’s something that we’ve had to learn a whole new set of soft skills to deal with.

David: It feels like the last couple of years have been the most advanced MBA any leader’s ever taken.

Zac Robinson: Absolutely, absolutely.

David: Full-on anthropology in the moment, learning as we go. And I echo your sentiment, and not necessarily in terms of the diversity question, but just the general, like we have a lot of also strong personalities in the company, a lot of creative people. So the way we work is, it’s like we’ll have a person dealing with the client, project owner, and then we’ll have script writers, storyboard artist, illustrator, video producer, sound effects editor all working together on a single project, which is awesome when we’re here because we can just quickly pull something together and it works. But during the pandemic, I found that people started to argue more than ever because it’s just that necessity for communication is a real strength when we’re together, but it’s so easy to misunderstand somebody when you’re just typing, hey, the client said no. That hurts. But when you can say, hi, you know, the client wasn’t really sure about this one, he just feels differently. So yeah, I think what we’ve done with that is we’ve tried to have a post-pandemic hybrid model. So we get to meet everybody, everyone’s in the office on Monday, and everyone else is two days a week after that.

Zac Robinson: Yeah.

David: So we get the deep work at home, but we get to pick up on those little signs of people who are not happy or there’s a problem. So yeah, that’s a really good part.

Zac Robinson: And that’s now, I think, the challenge that we’re facing coming out of it. You use the phrase deep work, which I love. There are huge benefits to that working from home side as well. There’s an element of focus that you don’t get elsewhere. And now that we’ve learned how to do that balance when people are working remotely, how to get that human interaction without the physical cues, without the tone of voice sometimes exactly, we now need to figure out how to retain the ability to keep that deep work, to keep that focus as well, as we start transitioning back to the office. So I’ve spent two years getting the best MBA a person could get. Now I need another two years to get to the other side of it. I remember what I was doing before. I was like, how was anyone getting anything done?

David: It’s a great point you make though. One of my colleagues said to me on Monday, we had a performance review, and she said that she felt a bit guilty because when she’s at home, she’d concentrate a lot. When she’s at the office, when a video was rendering, for example, then the team might get together and have a coffee, and then when the video’s finished rendering they don’t know for 20 minutes because they’re having a good time playing on the Switch or whatever.

Zac Robinson: Yeah.

David: And I said to her, that’s why we work in the office. It’s not just about the productivity. If it’s just productivity, let’s outsource to India and Vietnam or whatever it is. That’s not the reason of having a company, right? An organization, a brand, as you said, it’s a personality, and that comes from its people playing together, working together, having fun together. It’s part of the creative process. So I like this new hybrid post-pandemic world.

Zac Robinson: Absolutely. No, I’m the same. And I don’t want to use the word nerd too much before I dig myself a hole, but I’m a huge nerd for etymology. We so often forget that company has multiple meanings, and we see company as this corporate, straight-laced, upstanding thing. Company is about company. It’s about human company. It’s about being friends with people and knowing people, and colleagues are people you see every day and you get along with. And we spent two years kind of forgetting that.

David: So yeah, about company. I like that.

Zac Robinson: Absolutely.

David: Not Vincent Kompany, the Man City player.

Zac Robinson: No, absolutely not. He doesn’t work here yet.

David: Yeah, I think, right, okay. Still in the hiring process.

Zac Robinson: Yeah.

David: So we spoke about some of the challenges of going through a rebrand, some of the challenges of etymology and stuff, well-being and happiness. So I think these are quite situationally specific issues. Branding, hopefully, is once every decade. Pandemics, hopefully, once in a lifetime. That would be nice. But I think the B2B sector generally has a challenge when it comes to marketing because billions of dollars are invested every year in various soft drinks campaigns to promote their products and other such retail-based B2C organizations, but there’s not really a best practice for B2B. It seems to some degree the industry still lags behind in terms of especially the digital presence. There’s a lot of offline things, which I think for B2B is important, to meet people face to face. What do you think are some of the challenges that the B2B marketing sector more broadly faces?

Zac Robinson: That’s a good question. There’s a lot to choose from there. If I’m going very high level, I would say the biggest challenge of B2B marketing is that second B. B2B marketing is B2C marketing. Fundamentally, you mentioned that in-person interaction is extremely important. For me, that’s because B2B marketing is B2C marketing. It is individual decision-makers on both sides that are key to all of these things. And sometimes people can hide behind that. They can say, well, as a company we have a marketing team, and our clients as a company will have a procurement team. Surely that’s the end of it, and it’s just absolutely not the case.

David: Like, well, I’ve hired 15 people, surely they’re doing it.

Zac Robinson: And it’s not. This comes back to what we were saying about brand. Brand is what the world knows when they meet someone from our company, in our case our firm. But that’s not the end of the story because they know that about every other brand in the market as well. It’s that individual relationship that comes out of it, and convincing people of that, especially if they’ve had years of hiding behind a shield of B2B, can be a real challenge.

David: You think personal branding.

Zac Robinson: Yes, exactly. That personal branding. B2B branding almost gives people a get out of jail free card for not looking after their personal brand, and that’s something that needs to shift. That’s something that, if I’m talking to all the law firm marketers, I take part in lots of international law firm marketing groups, that’s always the first thing that I want to discuss with them. How are you working on personal branding with your lawyers? What are the techniques that you’re doing? Because we’re all good at law firm branding. We wouldn’t be in the jobs if we were not. But the conversion aspect, that relationship building, that connecting with clients, that comes down to the lawyers, and it’s our job to work with them to help them do that.

David: Absolutely. I echo all of those sentiments. The genesis of Lexicon actually comes from a similar situation. I was working for one of the big four, and it was just amazing that there was so much talent in the organization, and obviously the brand is solid, it’s a global brand, the general marketing is good, the brochures are very nice, but just fee makers are making such big fees and they’re so busy that they don’t really have time to write their own articles necessarily. So I saw a gap there for a little agile storytelling organization that could plug in and help these bigger firms to succeed, and I think it’s worked out okay. But I think for anybody watching at home, the power of LinkedIn is really important for this. You can build a personal brand, whether you’re a junior or you’re a CEO, tomorrow. Connect with the ideal audience, decide how you want to bring yourself to the world, and get started, so you’re good to go.

Zac Robinson: I would add to that, if you’re watching this and you’re a leader in a professional services firm, make sure that your fee earners, and you brought up the phrase fee earners so I’m free to use it, please do, I blacklist that word sometimes, but make sure that your fee earners know the importance of focusing on their business development time. And if that means 15 minutes, 20 minutes at the beginning of each day to check their LinkedIn, reply to their messages, that’s all it takes. But if you’re in charge of what counts as usable time, and the only thing you’re giving them is billable hours, scrap that, get rid of it. Find a way to factor in time to do business development. A marketing and BD team can only do so much. That bottom of the sales funnel, that’s your fee earners. And if all you’re giving them is fee earner time, they’re not doing it.

David: It’s also possible to outsource those services to organizations in Bangkok. So I think you’ve alluded to it multiple times here, the Byzantine nature of large firms, the history, 130 years to put together. Developing a successful marketing strategy is a massive challenge for any organization, but I know you recently went through that process also. They don’t let you rest, do they? Finish one thing and onto the strategy. But what lessons can you give to the folks at home on how to develop a successful strategy?

Zac Robinson: Sure, yeah. Patience. Patience is the key word in developing a strategy, especially when, as I mentioned, a professional services firm has so many stakeholders. Everybody wants so much. It’s so many good people with so many good ideas. Developing a strategy is all about picking those that are most likely to succeed, those that are most likely to actually add value to the growth of the firm, and then managing expectations around the resources and the time it will take to achieve them. We are all experts in our own field. Good strategy is harmonizing all of those experts together to future-proof your business, and that takes patience, infinite patience. Somebody will come into your office one day and say I want an office in Bhutan and I want it tomorrow, and you need to be able to explain, A, whether or not that’s a good idea, and B, how long that will take, who it will need in order to get it off the ground, and why it can’t happen tomorrow.

So managing those expectations, personal relationship building within the firm to make sure that that’s not done in an abrasive way. You don’t want a strategy to be a war of attrition. And finally, between patience and relationship building internally, good judgment is just key to all of it. People say it’s something you can’t train. You absolutely can’t train good judgment. That is fundamental.

David: Okay. And I guess ultimately it’s about having, whether it’s a physical document or whatever, just like this is the way we’re going.

Zac Robinson: Yeah.

David: So we’ve discussed it for however long we need to align, because we can’t keep discussing it forever. You need to set a goal for the next year and then get on with it.

Zac Robinson: Yeah, absolutely. And with that, I always say that a good strategy document is a tool that anyone can use to get their project approved, and you should be writing a strategy with that in mind. If you as a C-suite executive have 15 people coming into your office a day saying I want to do this, I want to do this, I want to do this, that strategy is your tool to decision making on those projects. You want them to come into your office and say, I want to do this because it aligns with this piece, this part of this one piece of paper that dictates everything we do. It makes your life easier, it makes the firm’s life easier, and it means that you are all on the same page, literally.

David: Absolutely. If we’re making declarations that I also, I’m a nerd and I love strategy, I love strategy documents because it gives you those things, like you said. Especially if you’re dealing with a big organization, many partners, they can say, okay, well we want to write this type of content. Okay, but the theme for this month is this. So by all means, how can we fit your theme into that? But we can’t just pivot in a different direction because our webinars, our articles, our videos, a newsletter, all of them are on this theme. So we need to find a way to harmonize you with this. Your month is two months down the line. And also then, a justification for different platforms. Social media is not a unitary concept. If you’re a B2B organization, put 99.9 of your resources into LinkedIn. Instagram, okay, if you want to use it on your careers page as a recruitment tool and tell your internal culture, fine. But yeah, the strategy allows you to rationalize that too, like why we’re not on whatever’s coming tomorrow. I don’t know what’s coming tomorrow, but two second clips videos, yeah, we’re not going to use that because our audience is not there.

Zac Robinson: Exactly. And that’s really that good judgment point. We do need to be flexible to some degree. We can’t, five years from now, if LinkedIn is gone, which it won’t be obviously, and all of professional services has somehow ended up on Clubhouse, there needs to be flexibility there. But the judgment needs to be there to know when to adapt, and that also needs to be baked into the strategy. That’s something that we face in law constantly, every morning, especially in Southeast Asia where it’s a very reactive legislative region. If we wake up tomorrow and there’s a new piece of law, we need to have something in the strategy that lets us know how we are reacting to it. For example, a few years ago Thailand really unexpectedly legalized medical cannabis. We came to the office that day and the only thing on the agenda was we know that we could do this. This is an area of law that fits in extremely well with everything that we do. We are very strong in life sciences, we have lots of transactional work on pharmaceuticals, we have all the international contacts. Do we build a cannabis practice around this piece of legislation? And in that case the answer was yes. You know why I chose that example. But a new piece of legislation came out the following day where the same question came up, and that happens all the time. The strategy lets us make those decisions so much more easily. Which of these balls in the air do we react to? Which ones are we catching? And that’s what a strategy does, because otherwise you’re just being pummeled with tennis balls all the time.

David: All right, okay. Just like you mentioned Clubhouse as the technology of the future.

Zac Robinson: Yes, absolutely.

David: Lasted what, seven days?

Zac Robinson: Yeah, about that.

David: Yeah, no court cases on Clubhouse in that same amount of time. I always felt Clubhouse wasn’t gonna work though, even from the start, because at least from a very subjective perspective, it was the worst kind of communication. I’d much prefer, if I’m gonna, if I don’t have the visual aspect, I’d prefer to write because I can think about it more carefully, I can choose my words. If it’s a peer-to-peer communication, much better to do it physically. If not, video is okay, but you lose a lot. Take away all of the good things and just have the voice, I hate phone calls. Everyone hates phone calls, surely.

Zac Robinson: Yeah, exactly that. So I mentioned earlier that people say you can’t train good judgment. Clubhouse is a perfect example of how you can. Somebody looked at consumer behavior and somehow came to the conclusion that conference calls were what the millennial generation, the Gen Z generation, they love conference calls, let’s make conference calls social media. It’s just terrible judgment, and yeah, it went exactly the way you would expect a conference call based social media to go.

David: Exactly. But it’s a good point that you make that things evolve all the time. Technology evolves, the zeitgeist changes, as we’ve just seen in the last five years. It’s a completely different world. For me, the way I see marketing is that the concept doesn’t really change that much. I love the old school copywriters from 100 years ago, the guys who would have just a great headline. Obviously they’ve got a brand voice, they know exactly what they’re trying to achieve, they have a great opening sentence, and then there’s a slippery slope all the way through to the bottom where you cut out the coupon and you take it to the post office. For me, that’s classic copywriting, but that’s the same lesson that you would apply to an article that you would write, a social media post. You need a good image and a good caption and a good headline, a good call to action. So I think the essentials don’t change that much. But obviously in the law sector, it’s one of the oldest industries that’s ever existed, right? So I’d imagine the way that Aristotelian marketing worked would be quite different to the Clubhouse generation. So how do you see the world of law marketing evolving?

Zac Robinson: No, that’s a fair question. And Aristotle would have been great on Clubhouse, made his life much easier. Law firm marketing, really at its core, is about communicating in a sensible, rational way very complex topics. I always say that law is one of the few industries where we don’t necessarily have a tangible product. What we’re selling is comprehension. We’re selling understanding of something that can be incredibly difficult. And as the world evolves, as we find new ways to simplify the arcane, to simplify the very obscure, legal services evolve with it and legal marketing follows suit with legal services.

So whether that means marketing through new technologies, we’ve been doing a lot with, for example, WeChat for Chinese clients, that really requires a different set of skills in terms of copywriting. Traditional legal marketing from a copywriting aspect was white papers and lengthy articles. We now need to be able to do that in 300 words, to communicate with people very quickly on the go. Ideally 50 words, but apparently that’s not achievable. New law, good. New law, good, but careful. So a lot of it is around adapting existing skills, adapting writing styles, adapting communication styles.

And then the other key side of it is around borderless delivery. It seems odd saying that after we’ve all spent two years doing everything in a borderless way, but actually that’s a skill that is constantly evolving. It’s not just jump on a Zoom call, host a webinar. It’s saying, well, how do we get that to the right people, and who are the right people? If I’m communicating this new law in Thailand, let’s use the medical cannabis thing as an example, and I’m throwing that out onto the internet, surely they’ll find it. Well, no. That’s something that the legal industry has not been great at, targeting the right people. And in international law, that’s so important. Doing that groundwork first, finding out where the interest lies, is a very different skill set in the modern world, in the virtual world, than it was 20 years ago when you could just go to one event a month and know that that event was the group of people you’ve known since law school, the group of people that have always engaged you and your firm. Done. That’s not the case. With medical cannabis, for example, we need to be reaching the general counsel of cannabis companies in countries where the medical cannabis industry has been up and running for a while. We need to connect with them on a level they understand. We need to understand the industry in their jurisdiction, and we need to find a way to reach out to them and connect with them directly. You can’t do that at the standard Thursday dinner that you’ve been holding with your law school class for the last 20 years. So that’s the key evolution, adapting to borderless communication and adapting to modern styles of communication.

David: Okay. In short, complex but fun.

Zac Robinson: Exactly that. Complex but fun.

David: Okay, all right. So I think that’s all with the serious questions. Let’s pivot to perhaps our favorite topic. So Zac, you and I have spent countless hours discussing all sorts of different weird and wonderful stories. Obviously as somebody who’s passionate about branding and marketing, storytelling is something that you care about. So who are some of your favorite storytellers?

Zac Robinson: Oh, that’s a big question, and I could give you, I suppose it depends what kind of time of day you catch me really.

David: It’s quite early.

Zac Robinson: Yeah, absolutely. Well, you said away from the serious questions, so I’m going to give you a serious law firm answer. As I mentioned, I was a lawyer before I was a marketer, and for me being a good lawyer is all about storytelling. Good legal practice is good storytelling. And not just in the obvious sense of being a litigator in court and telling your client’s story. Every legal document tells a story. You get the driest, most oblique contract and it’s still fundamentally the story of a relationship between the parties to that contract, right from the beginning to the perceived end.

David: You’re not just laying out, I want to do a deal and there was no…

Zac Robinson: Exactly. There’s, we want to do this, this is what it looks like, this is what happens if it goes wrong, this is where we see it ending. In some cases, if you’re doing a major infrastructure project for example, that story that you’re telling runs 30, 40 years down the line, up until decommissioning, how those relationships work with other people, how they work with the government. So it’s this fascinating storytelling medium in every area of legal practice. If you like a storytelling medium, you see that, you see the hero’s journey in every contract.

David: Exactly that.

Zac Robinson: Exactly that. Everything is underpinned by law, and we pick those laws out and tell the stories around them. So on that basis, the best lawyers are amazing storytellers. The best lawyers are the best storytellers. Can I give a non-professional answer now as well?

David: When you’re not enjoying the fine jurisprudence storytelling, what are the types of stories you enjoy?

Zac Robinson: Absolutely. So that’s the boring answer. The fun answer is, it’s actually the same sort of basis really. I believe that the best storytellers give people the tools to tell their own stories, same as lawyers do. We do that Neo in the Matrix of law, we pick out those threads, but really they help the clients achieve their goals and make sure that story future-proofs them long term. If you give someone the tools to tell a great story, best storyteller in the world. And on that basis, Gary Gygax, which I said I wasn’t going to be a geek, Gary Gygax is the inventor of Dungeons & Dragons. But for what, three generations now, the storytelling ability that he gave to the world has helped kids and adults alike spend their weekends with their friends building stories and building worlds with those stories. Millions and millions of people have engaged with the storytelling tools that he gave people to build their own stories. That, to me, is untouchable.

David: Would you say it’s like a haiku, whether it’s not infinite possibilities, but within those parameters there is almost infinity?

Zac Robinson: Exactly that, exactly that. Sometimes setting the boundaries gives us more possibilities than living in a sandbox.

David: I think it’s the same lesson with brand and with strategy though, right? You can still do an awful lot within those parameters, but here’s our values, here are our content pillars, here’s our goals. It sets the direction, but it doesn’t necessarily determine the output.

Zac Robinson: Exactly. Scaffolding and strategy is a wonderful example of that. We said earlier it’s that one piece of paper that you can point to to get a project through. I’m not saying what those projects are, I’m just saying it sets the parameters that we can work within over the next few years to keep us all on the same page and to stop us opening an office in Bhutan. But sometimes that leads to much more creative results, and crucially it lets everybody within the organization tell their own story within those parameters.

David: Absolutely, yeah. The power of storytelling. So before we wrap it up, go into as much detail as you want here or don’t, what are some of the other names of the types of storytellers that you enjoy?

Zac Robinson: Oh sure. So I’m a big history buff, so there’s a lot of historians that I have a great deal of time and respect for. Nobody needs me to rattle off historian names. Neil Gaiman is absolutely incredible. I would give a shout, are you aware of a thing called Anansi stories?

David: So the reason Neil Gaiman made me think of them, Neil Gaiman wrote a book called Anansi Boys, which was about, there’s an African god called Anansi who was a storyteller. He was a spider, a weaver of stories. And the key element of an Anansi story is that, A, it’s never written down, but B, it changes and it adapts to whatever’s happening around it.

Zac Robinson: Like a spider does.

David: Like a spider’s web.

Zac Robinson: They will always be able to create a web somewhere, and he’s this trickster god. So Anansi stories are an oral tradition that allows you to tell a story that adapts to the situation. So on that basis, in a very Time magazine way, I’d say everybody is my favorite storyteller, as long as they can tell an Anansi story, as long as they can find the right story for the situation. That to me is more important than being able to write a lengthy novel, and it’s one I stole directly from Neil Gaiman. So I borrowed that shamelessly. And one more would be, as of this week, whoever wrote the video game Horizon Zero Dawn, because, oh my word, what an incredible tale.

David: Are you, just absolutely fantastic. If you haven’t played it, play it. Old, everything is storytelling and everyone is a storyteller. It’s a very powerful message to end on. Zac, thank you so much for your time. I had a wonderful time.

Zac Robinson: My pleasure. Thank you for the opportunity.

David: Thank you for tuning in. Thank you.