On a recent episode of Law Tech Talks, produced in partnership with mattero, the trio of female legal leaders spoke about how their roles in the legal profession have evolved post-pandemic with the rise of flexible working and the rise of legal tech.

In terms of implementing legal tech as a firm owner, Ms Brauman said she’s always tried to think of tech “as a tool” more than anything else.

“I’ve always tried to go, OK, what’s the opportunity? What’s the continuing improvement that I can implement from even other industries? What they’re doing with being cloud-based for 10 years and all those sorts of things. We’ve set up initially, utilising and embracing tech. And I think marketing has become far easier with tech,” she explained.

“Reporting and overseeing what’s happening with a growing team and leading has helped with tech, and Zoom has helped so much with communication. So, embracing all the things and trying to be up to speed with what tools are available tech-wise, but without then thinking that tech is the solution for your problem. It’s about implementing a tool.”

Similarly, Ms O’Farrell said she “couldn’t agree more” that legal tech is a solution, as opposed to a driver — especially in terms of the communication benefits of MS Teams and Zoom.

“We’ve always had a large portion of our client base overseas. I’ve always been heavily reliant on email, but it’s the fact that we could now use video-conferencing facilities. And everybody’s so familiar with how they work has actually improved our ability to communicate with our clients internationally because that’s now an option that’s on the table. And the ability to attend court hearings and directions hearings and the like from the office or from home is incredibly beneficial,” she said.

“It reduces the cost for clients in terms of travel time, and it makes it much easier for people to get to these events. There’s time and place, there [are] times when there’s no alternative or [when] tech doesn’t provide an alternative to actually having a face-to-face meeting. And there are times [when] you need to make a call as to what forum or what platform’s going to be most appropriate to get the result that you’re after at a time. But it’s enormously beneficial to people that are trying to run flexible practices, having everything in the cloud and being able to communicate on various platforms is wonderful for accessibility.”

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For Ms Kish, technology has become a “real aid” in terms of relationship building — as well as helping maximise efficiency.

“My colleagues can probably say that there [are] so many people that you have yet to meet in person, and you have a strong, lively, engaged relationship. It’s certainly been for me an incredibly effective aid in relationship building and also in helping us do all those jobs that we don’t want to do,” she said.

“So, I’ve found in my business; I made a whole list of all the things that I didn’t want to be and all the jobs that I didn’t want to do. And you look at what can be outsourced, what can tech do, what can be delegated and increasingly with the availability and improvement of tech platforms. That option of what tech can do is certainly growing.”

Legal tech has helped all three female firm owners in their journey — and Ms Chevallier-Knospe said that offering added flexibility is a key part of that.

“It’s not designed to be all and end all. But if it offers that flexibility through being a browser-based cloud-hosted solution, we offer lots of integrations to other platforms and software. So hopefully, we are giving them a bit more of that flexibility to use their favourite applications and the market-leading applications in all different areas,” she explained.

“So, their favourite marketing tool, their favourite finance tool, whatever they like to use. And if we can talk and bring all those together into that one legal practice management solution, then they’re getting the best of everything to try and help their firms become more efficient and spend less time doing things manually. But hopefully, automating some of those processes for them.”

When asked what they had learnt on their journeys as female firm owners, the trio also had a number of key takeaways for women in law.

“I think women in law need to be aware that, yes, the juggle is real. There are so many aids to help us, such as legal tech, but be very aware that ... we can do it all, but there [are] going to be consequences — or consequences sounds very serious — but there will be outcomes for working and doing things at a very high level,” Ms Kish added.

“Just that awareness and what we can do to support ourselves, be very aware of our tendency as women, particularly mothers, to want to help others support others. And what support actually looks like for you. So sometimes going and resting and having a self-care day isn’t actually restful or relaxing when you’ve got this to-do list. Think about how you can create a community, how you can create support structures that actually lend themselves to you feeling better, more in control and better able to lead a very purposeful, successful business.”

And whilst balance can be tricky with a family and a firm, Ms O’Farrell said that six years after starting her own firm, she’s surprised more women aren’t doing the same.

“The barriers to entry in terms of starting up a new legal practice now are very low. You need a computer, you need some software, you need some insurance. You need the ability to promote yourself and let everybody know what you’re doing.

“But there are loads of really supportive people out there that want to see these small law firms grow and succeed. And there are lots of clients that are really attracted to the proposition of being a really important client to a small practice. So, there [are] a lot of win-wins out there,” she said.

To hear more about how we can lift the visibility of women in legal tech so they can bolster existing practice areas and influence the legal tech of tomorrow, come along to the inaugural Women in Law Forum 2022. It will be held on 24 November at Grand Hyatt Melbourne. Click here to book your tickets and make sure you don’t miss out!

For more information, including agenda and speakers, click here.

The transcript of this podcast episode was slightly edited for publishing purposes. To listen to the full conversation with Fiona Chevallier-Knospe, Georgina O’Farrell, Jacqueline Brauman and Perpetua Kish, click below: