I didn’t start my career in legal technology, but I did find I had a skillset that was well-suited to it. You don’t need to be a lawyer or already work in tech to work in legal tech. Before I started working at mattero, I worked within the Commerce Faculty for Queensland TAFE, which provided me with the tools to easily step into the legal technology world.  I come from a background of delivering training courses and liaising with key stakeholders to gather requirements for business courses.  When I moved into the legal industry, these skills were easily transferable, so at first, I worked with law firms providing onsite training, and then I moved into implementing software.

I spend a lot of time communicating with clients, over the phone or video conferencing, to get a clear understanding of their business requirements. Building strong relationships is really important—we need to have a good understanding of our clients’ needs. I work closely with the mattero development team to discuss, review, and provide feature requirements and updates to be developed. 

I also do quality assurance, making sure clients’ use and expectations will fit with our business requirements. We regularly update our software to provide new features to clients, usually monthly, and I prioritise the critical updates so that the most impactful new features are provided to clients quickly. Having a cloud-based platform allows us to make sure the critical updates are rolled out to clients quickly.

In the last few years, I have seen an increase in women sole practitioners, because they can easily operate their business without huge overheads. Cloud-based software means you can work remotely, it’s accessible, so you are able to operate without a traditional office space, and with more flexibility. Our training and help guides are all self-service and hosted online, which reduces training costs. It also means you can provide the same flexibility to staff, so it’s often more appealing for women employees, and women leaders can change the culture from that more traditional male-led practice that was more common in the past.  

Women are often juggling family responsibilities with work, so having flexibility allows them to work in new ways and develop their own firm culture to suit. I think it’s really important for women to mentor other women, to support their confidence to move forward in their legal career. Taking on leadership roles can be a struggle for women, as we often need to prioritise family commitments, so having other women to empower them and demonstrate strategies to have work/life balance is critical. As a mum to two young children myself, I’ve seen how important flexibility is for me and my family—having that positive culture in the workplace makes the world of difference. 

Having flexibility to work remotely and still have full access to your firm’s system is critical for better work/life balance. I think things are changing, people no longer believe that you must be in the office to be productive—and when you consider travel time and so on, people can often achieve a higher rate of productivity working from home. When your clients are also working remotely, being able to jump onto a Zoom session is more efficient for them.  We’re seeing a lot of women starting out as solo practitioners, and then expanding and growing because they have the right tools in place. In turn, these women-run businesses are then able to innovate and change their cultures, and with SaaS, we can be responsive to that and adapt and change the software to suit our clients’ needs, rather than the other way around. 

Clear and open communication channels are really the key to getting remote working right, such as daily stand ups where the team discuss their current work and challenges or roadblocks allowing the team to keep moving forward. 

There are so many opportunities for women in the legal tech sphere. Tech is the means for a lot of these changes to happen—you can’t work from home unless you’ve got the tools to do so. I’d really encourage women to think about their transferable skills if they’re interested in getting into legal tech—having experience in any aspect of the legal field is really desirable to legal tech employers because you have that understanding of how a law firm functions, so you have that insight into where technology may be able to help improve processes. There’s a real scope for technology to continue to drive the changes the industry needs. 

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