How to break into Legal Tech without a legal or tech background

With the growth of legal operations as a discipline and the focus on legal technology in particular, I'm always curious to understand how people I meet in this space have got into legal tech and legal ops in the first place.

The answers are usually either that a) they were lawyers who got into tech and/or ops, or b) they are people who have got straight into technology and then focused on the legal sector in particular.

It's pretty rare to hear someone say that they are first and foremost an operations person who just happens to work with legal teams, but that's what I am.

Before setting up Mint, I spent the majority of my career working in-house in TV and, for most of that time, I worked as a non-lawyer within the legal function. And, while I love technology, I'm not a developer or anything like that.

So, how do you get into legal tech if you don’t have a background in either legal or tech?

Well, the good news is that there is a lot of common sense but highly skilled work that has an outsized value when it comes to thinking about legal technology.

Most people in the legal ops space whose opinions I value are always clear about the fact that technology should be looked at in the context of a wider operating model that provides the foundations for a well-run, value-adding legal team that is enjoyable to work in.

How many times have you heard that success is a combination of people, process, and tech in that order of priority? It’s a cliche because it’s true.

So, a focus on legal tech tends to turn into a focus on legal ops - because tech deployed without a wider sense of a team’s purpose, and technology’s contribution to that purpose, tends to fail.

So, if you'd like to get into this space but do not have a legal background and don't consider yourself a techie, here are a few tips to help you on that journey.

Be curious.

If you know that you need to know more about something, whether that is the way that legal teams work or particular aspects of legal technology, the good news is it has never been easier to access information.

• Begin to read and curate the huge amount of knowledge that is available online. As a starting point, use LinkedIn, where people are often sharing insights and YouTube, where most legal tech products have a presence and demonstrate new features and updates.

• Sign up for events, both big and small - many of which often have an online component so geography is not an issue.

• Speak to the many helpful people in the community who will be happy to help you.

The key thing that you need to bring is a desire to find out and learn, and to be comfortable with the fact that you are never going to know everything.

Remember to start with the basics.

One of the drawbacks of the pace of change in legal tech and tech generally is that it can sometimes blind us from the fundamentals.

Success in legal ops and legal technology - i.e. changing ways of working to help teams be more successful - means we need to first determine:

• What we mean by success

• How things are working now

• Who does what

• How they do it

• How decisions are made

• What does doing it well look like

• How we’ll know how if things are going well

Only then can you get to a place where you understand how legal technology can help in any given context.

Look outside the world of legal.

There are comparisons to be made and lessons to be learned - both good and bad - everywhere. How are things done in other disciplines? How much of what we consider to be legal tech is just tech and accessible to you in other (often cheaper) forms?

This is just another example of being curious. Understanding the work of the team that you work with is vital, because they're all different and the organisations they work within are all different. But being able to bring in lessons from the outside world can be enormously helpful.

These principles have stood me in good stead and continue to make working life interesting, engaging and satisfying, even in an ever-changing world and the age of AI - I hope you find them useful too.

If you'd like to talk about anything legal ops or legal tech-related, just drop me a line at allan@themintconsultancy.com or find me on LinkedIn.

Allan Smith

Founder

Mint Consultancy