The Legal Side of Tech

Nomad Futurist

In this episode, Nabeel and Phil are joined by Jim Grice, a lawyer who leads the data center and digital infrastructure team at Akerman LLP law firm.

As the Nomad team always says, this is the youngest industry with the most sub-verticals, and being a lawyer is one of them. You can, for example, start as a finance guy, get into real estate, then end up here - and Jim is a perfect example of it.

Jim outlines how his career path unfolded and what skills allowed him to end up where he is today,

“Learning how to talk to people and engage with people, whether it be your clients or people that you’d like to pursue as a client, that's the skillset that's probably allowed my career to flourish like it has.”

Nabeel asks Jim how he got involved in the data center space and technology specifically,

“It's all about the opportunity because sometimes that's what life does for you. And if you've got a window where you can pay attention to an opportunity, you can truly appreciate what it is. I had opportunities and have incrementally continued to migrate our practice exclusively to this space.”

Jim talks about what the future may look like from a real estate data infrastructure play and some issues he has been exposed to recently,

“We’ve already been dealing with power constraints in Europe, but the thing that's starting to hit now is power constraints in the United States, and that seems to be one of the hot-button issues right now.”

Nabeel asks, “knowing what you know today, what you have accomplished and where you're at in your life, what would you say to the young Jim?”

“I'll answer that question with what I'm trying to do now - I'm trying to encourage young people to understand that this is an industry that's worth thinking about. Play a role in this ecosystem, whether it be as a finance person or an engineer or some other discipline. We have a need for all of that.”