We sat down with Sam Puchala, who played a key leadership role at SATOV during his 16 years with the firm. Sam reflected on his time at SATOV and shared new perspectives gained through his current role as President of LexisNexis Canada, a leading provider of information and workflow solutions for legal professionals.

Q: Last year, we introduced a new SATOV tagline: “Bold Visions, Relentlessly Pursued”. While the words are new, the ethos behind them is longstanding. Based on your experience, how would you describe what “relentless” looks like in action?

Sam: We used to have a different phrase for it: “we’ll always find a way”. That was the mantra.

Sometimes that’s being more creative. Sometimes that’s investing more time. Sometimes that’s advocating for what is right. No matter what we had to do, we found a way to get it done.

You will work hard. That’s part of the deal. But the defining characteristic isn’t the number of hours you put in, it’s the mindset behind the work.

Q: Can you share an example that stands out?

Sam: One that always stuck with me involved a contingency-based cost reduction project. We found lots of opportunities, but the client project lead did not want to pursue one of the largest. He wanted to bury it, all for internal political reasons.

He essentially offered to pay us what it was worth if we didn’t surface that specific opportunity in our recommendations. We could have just taken the money, but Mark pushed bark hard. He was willing to risk our entire fee to ensure that the full analysis made it to the C-suite.

That’s what “relentless” looks like to me. It’s not about effort for its own sake, it’s about staying committed to the right outcome, even when there’s a cost to doing so.

Q: Thinking about your current role, could you share a way in which your experience at SATOV has influenced your approach to leading the LexisNexis Canadian business?

Sam: SATOV has an advantage, which is more of a cultural thing, in the way the firm has always partnered with client teams.

Large consulting firms have great client service models but they typically focus on working at the very top of the house. They take great care of the C-suite or private equity sponsor but they’re not as consistently good at engaging people across other parts of the organization.

We brought an orientation and level of humility that enabled us to work at all levels of an organization in a more collaborative way that ultimately gets to better results.

At LexisNexis, I make a point of doing the same – working with individual people at the ground level in our Canadian organization or with our extended team in Manila to really understand our business.

Q: What new leadership lessons were reinforced as you made the transition from a boutique consulting firm to a large, global organization?

Sam: I expected to face complexity in taking advantage of the tremendous knowledge and capability that reside within a heavily matrixed global organization. And it’s time well spent if you can tap into those strengths. It creates access to capabilities beyond our scale in the Canadian market.

The real challenge is to fully learn how to navigate that level of interconnectedness and pockets of capabilities across the organization.

Q: You are navigating complexity in your external environment, too. Anthropic’s announcement of new legal industry plugins for Claude Cowork caused a real stir this year. What’s your take on the current situation?

Sam: I think there’s a bit of an overreaction to the Claude announcement. Kudos to their PR team for being able to get that kind of pickup and response.

From our perspective at Lexis, Cowork will be a much more powerful tool once it is integrated into our LexisNexis Protégé product, thereby grounding it in authoritative legal data. That said, Agentic AI is absolutely the future of the legal industry. Our entire strategy at Lexis is grounded in that reality.

AI is now capable of enabling pretty much every legal workflow. At the current speed of development, new AI capabilities will have tremendous impact on the quality and efficiency of lawyers’ work. It’s going to change the economics of the industry – in a way that should also improve access to justice across the board.

Q: What factors have been most critical in helping LexisNexis’ Canadian or global teams embrace and embed novel AI-powered solutions?

Sam: We were very proactive in steering Lexis in the direction of AI, even before ChatGPT became the talk of the town in November 2022.

We had extractive AI, AI-enabled search, and cooperation with ChatGPT long before then, because the entire top leadership of the company knew this was going to be the future.

It was all the things you need to do within an organization – from investment to structure to incentives, to communicating the strategy and finding champions within the company.

And even accelerating our own adoption of AI – using third-party tools in how we work – which helps drive the culture of AI, even as we develop our own tools and products.

Q: How do you think about bringing along an entire organization when you are evolving so quickly and dramatically?

Sam: We realized that we needed a different approach with so much change. By way of example, we used to come together for a big annual training session for the commercial teams on product, go to market, and sales strategy. Then, as things started to change, we moved to something like a monthly training cadence. Even that was not sufficient: too much content per session, not enough reinforcement.

We’ve pivoted now to very frequent, small bites, with lots of reinforcements. You are better off to deliver something twice a week in a few, small learning moments, and repeat the same stuff in slightly different ways.

Q: What advice would you share for leaders who are facing similar, unprecedented levels of uncertainty and change driven by AI or other factors?

Sam: To borrow an idea from Peter Attia, you need to have very strong convictions, which are also very loosely held.

You need to move quickly, based on what you currently believe, but continuously reassess that direction based on new data and new conditions. Then you pivot just as quickly and relentlessly in that new direction. You can’t be scared to reverse course at times. The greater risk is in sitting still and wavering.

It has to be part of the culture, living with ambiguity and creating the psychological safety for people to feel comfortable changing direction. Fail fast, move on. When you succeed, double down and move on.

Doing this day-to-day requires a fine balance between efficiency and collaboration. We need to be talking to each other a lot more than we used to. It sounds counterintuitive to spend more time in meetings to move more quickly but we need to spend time reevaluating where we are going and when to change course.

Q: I asked about advice for leaders in general. Bringing things back to SATOV, what advice would you have for new or early-career consultants on our team?

Sam: I would say embrace the challenge. The toughest moments will be the most important moments. The easy stuff comes and goes, and you forget most of it.

Whether it’s a hard problem to solve, big personalities to manage, or a stretch of intense hours, those are the moments that really drive your development. You may want to press fast forward when you’re in them, but in the end, they make for the great stories, and they’re the ones that ultimately shape how you think, how you lead, and how you handle the next challenge.

Q: Final question – when you reflect on your time at SATOV, what stands out most?

Sam: For me, it’s the standard that people held themselves to – and held each other to.
There was a shared expectation that you would go the extra mile, think critically, and do what was right for the client. That creates an environment where people push each other to be better. And over time, that’s what drives both personal growth and meaningful results.