A Conversation With ... Austin Fax

You became managing member on Jan. 1. Tell me about the process and why you wanted the role.
Our most recent former managing member is Gregg Groves. When he took over for Matt Growcock, the idea was that this wasn’t going to be an extremely long-term thing. I think he always wanted to transition out of the managing member role and into more of a practicing attorney role. I’ve worked with Gregg for the last couple of years in preparing for this. The partners voted on it at the end of the year. Luckily for me, Gregg is still here, so he’s around for me to bug with any questions that I may have. Toward the end of last year, he approached me and said, “What do you think about making the transition official on Jan. 1?” And I said, “I don’t know if I’m ready, but I’m probably as ready as I’m ever going to be.” As a leader, the most important thing you can do is surround yourself with good people and then hope that you’re able to give those people the tools that they need to succeed. And I kind of see that as my job now. I’m very, very lucky in that regard that I have so many good people that I’m surrounding myself with. We’ve been around for a really, really long time, and I hope the firm is going to be around for many, many years to come. That’s my goal.

Will you continue to practice law in addition to this administrative role?
I still maintain clients. I still practice law. I still do primarily a lot of local government law. I’m the county counselor for Greene County and Christian County. I would say I probably take on less new clients and have been kind of diligent about that since the first of the year.

What does the role as county counselor entail?
I have been a county counselor with Greene County for two full years, and I’ve been county counselor with Christian County for one full year. I’ve taken those roles over from one of my partners, John Housley, who did that for decades, and Ted Johnson, who served as county counselor before him. Those roles have been in our firm for a really long time. I do a little bit of everything for both counties – from tax appeals to election issues, to writing opinion letters for our elected officials, to zoning cases. You name it, I’ve probably handled it for our counties. Working with the counties and county counselors is probably one of the favorite parts of my job in terms of practicing law.

Lowther Johnson is again at the top of Springfield Business Journal’s list of largest law firms in the Springfield area, with the firm experiencing some growth in recent years. What are your goals for the firm moving forward in this position?
Growth is a good thing and something that we look for. We’re not going to grow exponentially in terms of our numbers of attorneys. We’re usually right around the 20 mark. I don’t anticipate that in five years you’re going to see us have 30 or 40 attorneys. A lot of what we’ll be working toward is transitioning caseloads and transitioning legacy clients from some of our partners who either have recently retired or are in the process of retiring. Part of it is just continuing on the legacy of the firm.

What are some of the biggest challenges to navigate as you look forward in your industry?
Attracting talent to Springfield is always a challenge. We are not a big firm with corporate offices in St. Louis or Kansas City or out of state. So, it’s always a challenge trying to get good people who want to come and practice law down here. One of the things our bar is dealing with is artificial intelligence and figuring out how are we able to most efficiently provide services to our clients with the implementation of technology. There’s a few different schools of thought on that. It could save clients time; it’s also a fairly new field, so we want to make sure that the things that we’re using are tested and true. Our focus is just on our clients. If our clients are doing business differently now than they did 10 years ago, our needs have to meet where our clients are at.

How do you think generative AI could impact your industry? I’m seeing new technology available to the industry called CoCounsel.
Westlaw is our primary resource tool, and their generative AI function is CoCounsel. We don’t have that yet. I anticipate it will probably come at some time. I hope that AI is going to make legal research, if not easier, less time consuming. That will benefit not only us as practicing attorneys, but also our clients. If you’ve got a client who gets billed hourly, they get billed hourly for every minute that you take researching their case. If AI can do that quicker than what we’re doing manually, then that’s a potential benefit to our client. The other potential benefit that I see is with respect to document review, and this is true in business cases; it’s true in personal injury cases with respect to medical records. A lot of what we do either requires an attorney to look at and review and synthesize documents, or sometimes it requires a paralegal to review and synthesize documents. If AI is able to do that and it’s able to do it properly with no – I think the word is hallucinations that everybody’s concerned about – then that again will save us time and it’ll save our clients money. We’re already trying out some things on the personal injury side of AI. I think we’re eventually going to get there with respect to the research side and the document review side. Anytime you’re dealing with emerging technology, it’s always a balance of you want to be on the forefront of what people are doing, but you also want to make sure that the technology works and that it’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing. We want to be conservative with it.