From legal practice to legaltech: Building for, and serving, the profession’s needs

“What excites me most is seeing my ideas turned into products that make employment law more accurate and accessible for lawyers and their clients,” she says.

Legora APAC head of engagement Murray Edstein realised, he reflects, that he “liked being a lawyer, but I also liked being a builder”. When he started out as a lawyer in a BigLaw practice, legaltech consisted mostly of “incumbent legacy products”, but now – and armed with an understanding of how legal work actually gets done, and how to effect change within organisations – he’s in a position to help law firms and in-house teams answer the question of how best to utilise platforms that will drive the profession forward.

Andrew Medlicott, co-founder and managing director of nicholii who formerly worked at a national firm and then as a general counsel, comes from a similar place, having realised he had a “real passion” for the challenge of making complicated things simple, and finding ways to systemise legal and commercial problems.

“A lot of legaltech comes down to pattern recognition, observation and simplification, and then designing an experience that people will actually adopt,” he says. “That combination of law, technology and design is what excites me most.”

For others, the transition is much more natural: Mitchell Scott, a BigLaw and ALSP alumnus now working as the principal data scientist at Consilio, “always knew” he wanted to straddle the legal and computer science worlds, but had to bide his time as a litigator while waiting for opportunities to present themselves. Now, he says, “I love that I’ve been able to find a career that fulfils my desire to build things while remaining within an industry I love.”

As Scott points out, such vocational pathways have not always been readily available. Certainly, when this writer was approaching graduation as a law student in 2012, blazing a trail in legaltech was not an option that presented itself. For those coming through the ranks in 2026, however, being proficient with new and emerging technologies is a necessity in a changing professional landscape.

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Such change, is exciting, though. Stebbing says that, for those looking for a change, there are new roles opening up.

“Six months ago, I would not have known that the [LEAP’s parent company] ATI Group employs hundreds of lawyers across product, innovation, implementation, sales and education roles. There are many ways for us to use our legal skills, we just have to be open to them and leaving the traditional path.”

“Who knows, maybe something better, more flexible and creative is waiting,” she says.

Service, success, and advice

Working in legaltech means much more than simply supporting lawyers and teams to find and implement efficiencies. As Scott suggests, technology is a big part of the solution in improving access to justice.

“There are also lots of ways that interdisciplinary legal and technology skills can be helpful more directly through pro bono work. One example was a matter where our client was a prominent NGO tackling youth knife crime in Melbourne,” he recalls. “We were able to help with FOI requests for crime statistics and then assist with analysing the data we received. This became a critical piece of evidence for the NGO to prove their impact and secure additional rounds of government funding.”

To this end, a career in legaltech can speak strongly to a lawyer’s sense of service.

One of the biggest challenges for lawyers, Medlicott says, is finding time to tackle big issues and work on the more interesting opportunities facing clients. “If we don’t systematise the routine, make legal knowledge accessible to the people who need it, and ensure that only the work requiring our judgment ends up on our desks, I don’t think we’re serving our clients as well as we could,” he says.

“For me, legaltech is ultimately about buying back time for legal judgment.”

In employment law, Stebbing outlines, wage theft, modern award and minimum wage compliance have long been complex and time-consuming areas of practice, and wage reconciliations, remediations and pursuing underpayment claims can take months, if not years.

“Solving this, by coupling the most powerful AI tools, with the Fair Work Commission Modern Awards Pay Database, the Fair Work Ombudsman Pay Guides and Library and the custom knowledge layer built off my two decades as an employment lawyer – is now my full-time job”, she notes, and the development of products that can transform how lawyers and clients solve problems impacting millions of Australian workers “deeply satisfies my sense of service”.

For lawyers looking to transition to a legaltech role, there are certain skills and traits that have served those already in the space well. Edstein has a background in complex litigation, “which trained me to find the real issues amongst the noise of information and provide structured advice.” That's most of what leading change looks like, he says.

Just as important, he adds, is a passion for changing how law firms and in-house teams work. “For me, it showed up as wanting to build things and make them faster and better, and that carried straight across. The biggest adjustment was getting comfortable moving fast without every answer. I was fortunate to learn that through business school and consulting, but it's just as learnable on the job.”

Stebbing has “always had an entrepreneurial mindset and deep sense of fairness”, which – together with personal skills, learned legal critical thinking, problem-solving, and “a love of mapping on a whiteboard”, have made her journey a “very natural and easy transition”.

Medlicott feels that while there are obviously new skills to learn when moving from traditional legal practice into technology, in 2026, “I don’t really see law and technology as separate disciplines anymore. I think that time is over”.

“The lawyers who will thrive over the next decade will be able to speak fluently in both,” he predicts.

“They’ll sit comfortably in the middle of the Venn diagram, with law on one side and software and technology on the other.”

With that min mind: how can lawyers who are interested in legaltech position themselves for a career pivot?

Scott notes that, with the advent of AI coding agents, the barrier to entry for creating new technologies is dropping at an incredible rate. That means, he says, that almost anyone can make something, so the skills needed to ensure the right thing gets built are more important than ever.

“This is where deep subject-matter expertise becomes particularly valuable when building technology. It helps you understand how a specific practice area actually operates, but also helps you ask the right questions of your early adopters,” he says.

Medlicott supports, this, advising: “Experiment early. Vibe code. Build prototypes. Play with the technology you already have access to and work out where it succeeds and where it falls over. You really need to throw yourself into the technology and understand what’s out there and what its limitations are. At the same time, look closely at the legal problems you already solve and keep asking: how could this be done better?”

“If you’re doing the same legal task for the tenth time and you’re no more efficient than you were the first time, you should be asking yourself why,” he says.

As Edstein points out, one shouldn’t treat their legal background as something to be left behind. Instead, he says, “it’s your advantage”.

“Lawyers who understand how matters really run and why practitioners resist change are rare in tech. Pair that with real fluency in the tools: use them seriously, build workflows, and lead adoption in your own team. Then get comfortable talking about outcomes, not just legal accuracy. That's the language the business side speaks,” he says.

And, considering the question more holistically, Stebbing says that those considering a change first ask themselves why. “A change from employed lawyer, to business owner, to legaltech is not for everyone,” she warns.

Her own pivot was informed by lifelong learning, she says, such as seeking out CPD sessions that “sparked joy and interest in me”.

“Being informed and an early adopter will open up the opportunity for a pivot – if you decide that's what you want,” she says.

What the future holds

Looking ahead, Medlicott says, Australia is building a genuinely strong legaltech ecosystem, and lawyers are increasingly at the heart of it.

“I think that’s a very good thing,” he muses.

“Great technology ultimately requires adoption, and adoption depends heavily on user experience, user interface and, frankly, whether people actually enjoy using the product. I think Australian lawyers are uniquely well positioned here. We have a strong tradition of plain English law and a fairly no-nonsense approach to identifying the legal issues that actually matter in commercial context. I think that mindset translates particularly well into building technology that is useful, accessible and human,” he says.

Edstein feels similarly, pointing to the sophistication, pragmatism, and increasingly amibitious attitudes emanating from Australian law firms. “When practitioners help design the workflows, you get technology that fits how legal work happens, and it sticks. I think Australia can be a real leader here, not just a fast follower,” he says.

Elsewhere, Scott says the capacity for lawyers to build tools for themselves is “an incredible catalyst for change”. This, he says, has been central to the way software has evolved over the past few decades: “software developers created tools to make their own work easier, which eventually snowballed into some of the technological pillars everyone relies on today”.

“I hope the democratisation of coding allows a similar revolution to happen in the legal industry, as lawyers build tools for their own workflows and grow them with fellow practitioners,” he says.

To this end, Scott continues, it may be more useful to think of a lawyer’s involvement in legaltech as “sitting somewhere on a continuum”, rather than as simply having a legaltech job or not.

“Lawyers who choose to move towards the ‘creator’ end of the legaltech spectrum have more opportunities than ever to influence the future of the industry, and to help make the practice of law easier and more accessible,” he says, while “lawyers on the ‘user’ end of the spectrum are undergoing their own radical shift as the nature of legal practice changes around them”.

“In many cases, AI will require lawyers to become more the ‘manager’ of work than the ‘doer’ of it, which is a significant departure from the industry’s traditional pyramid structure.”

From Medlicott’s perspective, there’s only going to be more and more legaltech opportunities for practitioners in the future.

“I still think there’s enormous value in spending time working on difficult legal and commercial problems before moving deeply into legaltech. But increasingly, particularly in commercial law, I think we’ll see graduates move straight into careers that are a genuine hybrid of law and technology,” he says.

“For the next generation of lawyers, knowing how to practise law won’t be enough. Understanding how to turn legal judgment into systems that other people can use will become an increasingly valuable – if not necessary – part of the job.”

Ultimately, for Edstein, the growth in legaltech opportunities speaks to a profession that has stopped treating technology as an IT decision, and started treating it as a strategic one, central to driving organisational change.

That shift, he says, creates demand for people who can speak both languages: law and technology, practice and business.

“A decade ago, my path would have looked like leaving the law. Today it feels like a different way of serving it,” he concludes.

“There are now new pathways for lawyers who want more than a pure legal career and who want to help the profession get better at its craft, and I expect many more lawyers will follow.”