Experiment, learn and iterate. This product management ethos has certainly been the story of my career journey.
Deciding on law
Casting my mind back, I’m doing my A levels and considering next steps. I’m told by my parents, career counsellor and others that law is a “good, solid degree” to have with a clear career path to follow. I enjoy and am good at writing, analysing and debating, and deep down, I really just want to help people – law it is.
A consideration I neglected was what if I don’t want to follow the rigid and defined path of becoming a solicitor or a barrister? What then? If only someone had told me there were other routes and careers in legal available.
Once I graduated with my law degree, I pursued the solicitor path and undertook a number of paralegal roles in London-based law firms. All of them had the following in common: long hours; menial and repetitive tasks such as printing and filing and unduly long and manual contract reviews. All are pain points that now, in my current role, our customers face too.
I endured multiple rounds of vacation scheme and training contract applications, including assessment days and interviews, with no success. The last round at the firm I was working for at the time really hit hard and left me questioning: why am I not successful in securing a training contract? Is it because of my skillset and knowledge? Or because I’m not passionate about it – and that lack of passion comes across during interviews?
So, I tried something different.
Experimenting with a non-traditional legal career
I moved to an in-house role centred around contract and lease reviews, including obligation management, and streamlining legal processes – particularly those tightly linked with sales processes. My lightbulb moment was when I tried to implement a more robust and efficient process for KYC (know your client) checks. I was told that we had to use a traditional CRM tool not designed for legal operations, due to no money in the pot for other tools (i.e., legal tech).
I wondered whether I should pursue a path where I could use my first-hand experience of those pain points to help others solve the same problems. I knew of some legal tech from my research into what tools we might want to use during my in-house role, and I’ve always geeked out in relation to anything techy. But my knowledge in terms of careers in this space was limited. All I knew was there had to be a way to help deliver tech solutions to lawyers that would improve their day-to-day and save them time spent on tasks, such as countless hours drafting and reviewing – document automation anyone?!
I joined Thomson Reuters and became a solutions consultant for HighQ. This allowed me to form close connections with our fantastic customers and help them by developing solutions to streamline their processes, providing insights they were previously missing (think metrics around spend, risk, and workload) and giving them time back in their day.
An important part of this role is being close to the product team and providing customer feedback through the lens of use cases and end-to-end workflows. This last part is particularly important and highlights how legal knowledge and experience can prove invaluable to a legal tech team or company. Three key pieces have helped me succeed: being truly customer centric, actively listening and engaging with peers and customers (both internal and external alike), and always being curious.
Iterating on the non-traditional path
In early 2021, the HighQ product team created a new role for a product manager to focus on product development for core strategic end-to-end solutions and workflows. This sounded like a perfect fit for me. Joining the team, I shaped the role working closely with my fellow product managers, user experience and tech personnel to ensure that different features and capabilities tie together nicely to best serve our customers.
More recently, Thomson Reuters has shifted from product-specific teams to a unified, platform-wide team to achieve its goal of being a best-in-market legal tech and research solutions provider. My focus on the end-to-end use case and solution delivery has now been elevated across the entire platform – still including but not limited to HighQ – as a director in our platform experience team.
If you take only one thing from my story, let it be this: if you are struggling in your current role, question why that is and don’t be afraid to accept that it’s not right for you. These learnings and decisions reflect both personal and professional strengths; your skills, knowledge and experience will be invaluable and a great fit somewhere.
You don’t have to follow the traditional legal career path. Get out there and research, and connect with others to get insights! If you think you might be well suited to a more tech-centric role in the legal industry, there are a wealth of great resources online, and educational institutions that offer legal tech-dedicated modules and courses. Legal tech is not just about the solution; it includes the associated players and wider ecosystem – technology vendors, consulting and implementation services, legal operations, and the list goes on.
Be sure to explore all options. Start by following topics of interest such as #LegalTech on LinkedIn or Twitter, and connecting with people (including me!) to build your network, and gain insight and tips.
And remember, nothing is permanent. Experiment, learn and iterate. This same product management ethos applies to our careers.
Kirsty Ramsay
Director of Product Management at Thomson Reuters
