One of the freshest additions to the law tech events calendar, Legal Geek, took place in Shoreditch in London last week. With much more of a festival atmosphere than your traditional legal event, Legal Geek attracts a wide array of cutting-edge speakers. Among these was a panel representing women in the burgeoning law tech sector. Four inspirational women with a variety of expertise and career backgrounds took to the stage to discuss the challenges and opportunities for women in the industry.
These women don’t just talk the talk, as they say, but walk the walk; Dana Denis-Smith is CEO at Obelisk Support, a company focused on providing flexible legal work for law firms and in-house legal teams, and she founded the First 100 Years project, which aims to give women in the legal profession a platform to share and celebrate their stories.
Christina Blacklaws, who set up a virtual law firm, is a director of innovation and the incoming president of the Law Society; Katherine Ainley is CEO at Tikit, supplier of technology to the legal market and Somya Kaushik, founder of EsqMe Inc., a legal document marketplace that enables women to stay connected with other lawyers after leaving law firm roles.
The discussion kicked off by bringing up a recent report by the Council of Europe, showing that despite the slowly growing number of women reaching top positions in the legal market, Britain is falling behind its European neighbours in terms of the amount of women in the judiciary.
Women make up only 25 percent of judges in England and Wales, compared to the 33 percent average across Europe, and 40 percent in our closest neighbour Ireland. This set the scene in terms of how far the legal industry still has to go.
The panel discussed a variety of potential reasons for this slow progress. There is the challenge of juggling family life with the long hours expected from lawyers; or could it be that women are not pushing forward as hard as they could? An often quoted statistic from an internal report by Hewlett Packard showed that men apply for a job when they meet only 60 percent of the qualifications, whilst women only apply when they meet 100 percent. The panel’s attitude was that women should ‘go for it’ when it comes to looking for and grabbing opportunities: success won’t just happen by itself.
At the same time, there seems to be a cultural shift happening in the workplace that is not only about women. Thousands of people of both genders are leaving work in the US to focus on family. People seem to be starting to re-evaluate the work/life balance and look for more flexible job opportunities. Denis-Smith argued that the technology is already here to enable us to do so, and that it’s for firms, companies and people to actually ‘make the choice’.
Denis-Smith’s was a pragmatic view in terms of the opportunities for women in law tech today. Her point was that as with any business, ‘the power is in the money’. She urged the audience not cheapen what women do or achieve, and to listen. She highlighted that with technology and increasingly easier access to legal resources and collaboration online, agile work is very much possible.
In their concluding remarks, the panel highlighted one of the biggest issues: our unconscious bias. Harvard’s ‘Project Implicit’ features tests on social attitudes that help people realise this bias, which could be getting in the way of personal success and helping others succeed. Kaushik suggested that everyone can face discrimination in different ways, so there will always be challenges, but you shouldn’t let that stop you from reaching your aspirations.
They encouraged everyone to ‘back her’, because if society is built on a good legal system, we need to make sure the best people are there to make it happen – regardless of their gender.
