Legaltech Careers Guide: roles, organisations and routes into legaltech jobs

How do I get a job in legaltech? What guidance can you provide regarding legaltech careers? These are questions we get asked a lot. The people asking are both legal and other professionals looking to enter this increasingly diverse sector. 

To scale our advice we’ve created this guide to careers in legaltech, legal ops and innovation roles, whether in law firms, vendors or in-house legal teams.

We aim to maintain this guide and update it as the market evolves, and as we learn new things about the people hiring and seeking roles in legaltech, legal ops and legal innovation.

01. What does this guide include?

This guide includes our most frequent FAQs and advice based on our experiences and those of others working in legaltech, legal ops, and innovation who made the jump from a traditional lawyer role into this space, or who entered the space from outside of legal.

02. Who is this guide for?

This guide is for anyone working or looking to work in legaltech, ops or innovation. 

On the lawyer side, this includes:

• law students

• trainees

• newly qualified lawyers

• 2 – 5 year post qualification experience (PQE) lawyers

• senior associates

• counsel

• partners

• knowledge management lawyers

• professional support lawyers

• paralegals

For those from outside of legal, this guide is for anyone with professional skills in:

• product management

• project management

• operations

• sales

• marketing

• software development

• data science

03. Why are we writing this?

To date, a lot of this guidance has helped land interested individuals into exciting new roles through chats with our team.  This guide aims to democratise those chats and share the information more widely to help others weighing up this career move.

We hope this becomes the ultimate legaltech careers guide and we hope you find it helpful.  🤞

04. Want to contribute?

We want to maintain this guide as a living resource that grows over time as the market matures.  We want to ensure it is and becomes the most diverse and representative resource for the breadth and depth of legaltech related career paths and roles.  

Please do get in touch if you want to contribute, have a suggestion or a correction!

05. The Guide

Part 1 | Overview (this article)

Part 2 | What is legaltech? Something old, something borrowed & something new

Part 3 | Legaltech jobs: How to get one? In-roads, skills and where to find jobs

Part 4 | 21 skills relevant to legaltech, legal ops and legal innovation roles.

Part 5 | Legaltech roles. What are they? What skills do you need? Where do they lead and how much do they pay? What’s the work/life balance like?

Part 6 | From law to legaltech: how to make the move

Part 7 | Legaltech Cheatsheet – your guide to beginning your legaltech expertise

Part 8 | Career profiles (On-going)

⚡ Career Profile 01 | Alex Smith, Global Product Lead, iManage

⚡ Career Profile 02 | Tom Dunlop, CEO & Co-Founder of Summize

⚡ Career Profile 03 | Tunji Williams, Co-CEO & Co-Founder of ShareThing

⚡ Career Profile 04 | Steve Wheeler, CTO of Legatics

⚡ Career Profile 05 | Sam Smolkin, CEO & founder of Office & Dragons

⚡ Career Profile 06 | Devshi Mehrotra, CEO & co-founder of Justicetext

⚡ Career Profile 07 | Mary Bonsor, CEO & co-founder of Flex Legal

⚡ Career Profile 08 | Nitish Upadhyaya, Senior Innovation Manager for A&O’s i2 team

⚡ Career Profile 09 | Dave Wilson, Managing Director & Founder of Tigereye Consulting

⚡ Career Profile 10 | ???, Legaltech Consultant (Coming Soon)

We have a backlog of interviews to write up, covering a diverse range of individuals in every sense.

If you think someone should be featured, or would love to share your own story, please get in touch!

We want to interview the most diverse range of individuals and experiences to paint a representative and diverse portrait of this sector, and the people who make it happen. And we hope to do this at a global level.

Help us cover the sector and encourage others to add their skills to this space! Don’t be shy!