Legal Professionals

I am the CEO and Founder of BamLegal, a Legal Engineering Consultancy. I started out my career as a lawyer before moving into legal engineering and technology.

I first decided to try to become a lawyer whilst completing a college business course. The law module of that course was only 6 weeks long but it had a great teacher who made the subject interesting and fun. They often say it takes just one good teacher to change your life and this guy was mine. 

Without A-levels, I wasn’t sure if I would even get into a university to study law but I spoke to my teachers and with their support, I wrote to every law firm listed in the Yellow Pages (pre-Google!) in a 30 mile radius, large or small, requesting some work experience. This was back in the days we sent requests for work experience by a letter in the post so this endeavour cost me a fortune in stamps!

However, I got lucky in that Freeths wrote back and I managed to line up a work experience placement with them in Nottingham. I also got into Brunel University to do a four-year, thin-sandwich, degree. I knew that without incredible A-levels the only way I was going to be able to get a training contract after my degree and compete with those getting straight A’s and then attending Oxbridge or similar was to get lots and lots of experience so that I would be more knowledgeable about the industry and already have lots of great contacts.

It worked. I was offered a training contract with the firm I completed my second placement with and then upon qualification moved to Pinsent Masons. I qualified as a Commercial Real Estate solicitor and worked for four years mainly for pension funds, investors and banks.

After four years of practice, I had the opportunity to do a secondment to apply technology to the drafting of legal documents. I loved it so much, became fascinated in legal technology and saw how much there was that could be improved in the delivery of legal services. I asked Pinsents if I could manage automation firm wide and they said yes. I did that for three years before leaving to set up my own company to help law firms all over the world.

My career journey has been full of ups and downs…

Some of the downs would include never feeling valued as a junior lawyer due to the Partners being great lawyers but not great people managers (this is very common across all firms); a few years into BamLegal, collapsing with exhaustion; the time I had to tell my entire team I no longer needed their services as I was pivoting the business to a different model; having had ideas stolen and/or being overlooked due to being a young female (this does not happen anymore btw – I had to get over this and some of my behaviours to make sure it didn’t).

The ups so have been amazing though! I am my own boss which honestly is amazing, I make my own decisions, act as quickly as I want without having to wait for permission or file a huge businesses case to committees or boards; I don’t have to ask anyone how much holiday I can take or from where I can work (I once spent 3 months working from a beach in Goa); I have been able to travel the world and work with some seriously impressive and smart people in some of the best law firms; I invested in and was on the board of another company aged 34 which we successfully sold 3 years later; I have been able to support and help some incredible access to justice charities, a cause any lawyer should care passionately about; I get to work with students while mentoring or judging hackathons which I love as I learn so much from them; I was nominated by the Financial Times as one of the top ten Legal Technologists; and I have met and continue to meet many creative, courageous, passionate and kind friends by being a part of the Legal Tech community. As you can tell, I love my job!

If anyone wants to talk about how to get into Legal Engineering, Legal Technology and/or Design and Innovation, I am always happy to connect and chat on Instagram or Twitter where I go by @BamLegal.

Thanks to Tanisha for asking me to contribute – I thoroughly enjoyed writing this, it's good to remind ourselves sometimes where we started, where we are now and all the good things that happened in-between!