058: thrilling, not chilling: EQ in the age of AI | Libby Baney Burstein
In this episode, Deb Knupp welcomes back Libby Baney Burstein, a partner at Faegre Drinker where she has practiced for nearly twenty years in public policy across the pharmacy and FDA space, working to keep unsafe products away from the people they would harm.
"I actually think the best thing you can do in the age of AI is be your best human. Because that's the one thing AI can't do."
Libby has been on The HX Collective before, through the lenses of work, relationships, and self, and this time the subject is the disruption everyone in professional services is feeling at once: what artificial intelligence means for the practice of law, and who we have to become as the humans still delivering the service. Her answer arrives in the first few minutes and never wavers. This is a thrilling moment, not a chilling one.
Underlying the conversation is a reframe of what a client is actually buying. Libby calls it the stress transfer business. Nobody hires an expensive lawyer for something they could solve themselves, or that AI could solve for them. They are handing over stress, and the job is to be the human sponge that absorbs it and returns something actionable. That is why she describes her plan as future-proofing herself with better emotional intelligence rather than better information. Her agents can scrape the FDA warning letters, draft the analysis, and surface the precedent., and she checks every bit of it as the human in the loop.What they cannot do is sit in a room, hear the question behind the question, and move a human being to make the mission theirs.
Key Highlights
The stress transfer business: why no one hires an expensive lawyer for a problem they could solve themselves, and what it costs you, your clients, and your firm if you cannot absorb that stress and return something useful.
Thrilling, not chilling. Libby's answer to professionals frozen by AI, and the aha that changed things for her more than a year ago: you can simply let AI teach you about AI. No class, no tutorial, no going back to school.
The difference between having power and having authority, and why a correct memo changes nothing until someone makes it their mission.
About Our Guests
Libby Baney Burstein is a partner at Faegre Drinker, where she has practiced for nearly twenty years. Her work sits at the intersection of public policy, pharmacy, and FDA regulation, focused on protecting people from unsafe products sold online and offline, which she describes less as a practice area than as a mission. She has become an early and enthusiastic adopter of AI in her profession, running agent teams alongside her legal work and arguing, persuasively, that the technology's real gift is the room it clears for human judgment. She is also a longtime advocate for wellbeing in professional services, part of one of the earliest firms to treat brain health as essential to the practice of law, , and a member of the cross-practice community of high-EQ partners Deb helped design. Outside the practice she is a self-described yes person, a fitness person, a wife, and a mother to a twelve-year-old currently receiving the same lesson she gives her colleagues: getting the right answer is not the point, being the person others trust with it is.
Connect with Libby Baney Burstein
Libby Baney Burstein on LinkedIn
Learn more at Faegre Drinker
About the HX Collective
The HX Collective explores the human experience through three lenses: work, relationships, and self, through raw, authentic conversations rooted in human-centered design. Each episode offers gripping stories, thought-provoking discussion, and concrete tools that help you rethink your relationship with distress and strengthen your whole human experience.
