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Nandan Subramaniam is Principal at Zed Law, advising founders, investors and high-growth businesses on capital raises, M&A and complex commercial deals. He runs the practice from a farm in the Northern Rivers of NSW, where he and his wife raise 15 cows alongside the day job. He pairs an ex-top-tier corporate law background with an unusually hands-on approach to legal technology, building much of Zed Law's automation infrastructure himself so that senior lawyers spend their time on strategy rather than admin.
How did you start down this career path?
I took the scenic route.
I cut my teeth in top-tier corporate law at Ashurst, working on large-scale M&A and capital markets transactions. That period set an unapologetically high bar for technical quality and a deep respect for the craft.
From there I went in-house. First at Zepto, an Australian fintech scale-up, then at LUNA, where I led the legal function across fintech, health-tech, SaaS and AI. Those years on the client side were where my worldview really flipped. Sitting on the other side of the table from external counsel, I saw first-hand how badly traditional legal service delivery drags on fast-moving companies. Slow when you need speed. Over-lawyered on the small stuff. Under-commercial on the things that actually matter.
Around the same time, my wife and I packed up and left Sydney for a farm in the Northern Rivers. We now raise 15 cows alongside a working corporate practice. It is the least conventional move a top-tier-trained lawyer could make, and it has been the best decision we have made.
When Ryan Zahrai pitched me on what Zed Law could become, it was the clearest "yes" I have said professionally. The chance to take Big Law training and plug it into a firm willing to rebuild the operating model from the ground up. I am now Principal at Zed Law with equity in the firm, and the career I have is the one I would have designed for myself.
What inspires you in your role/industry? Why?
The clients, mostly.
I spend my time alongside founders, operators and investors who are building things that did not exist a year ago. Fintech, AI, health-tech, climate. They are some of the sharpest and most ambitious people in the country, and helping them move quickly through a capital raise, an acquisition or a hard regulatory question is genuinely good work. The raises, the exits, the ESOPs, the disputes, the "I need this yesterday" calls. That is the job, and I love it.
The other piece is the moment we are in. Legal services is being reshaped faster than at any point in the profession's history. By AI, by automation, by client expectations that no longer tolerate $800/hr first-years learning on the job. The leverage model that has powered Australian law firms for fifty years is being quietly rewired in real time. The firms that win the next decade will be the ones who figure out how to combine traditional legal excellence with a modern operating model. I want Zed Law to be one of them.
What's your approach to customer service that separates you from the rest?
We run the client relationship differently. Our Google reviews back this up.
When you engage Zed Law, you deal directly with a senior lawyer from start to finish. The person who picks up your first call is the person closing your deal. No partner pitch followed by a junior delivery, no handoffs between teams who haven't met you, no learning curve every time you need something.
That sits on top of two things that make the relationship actually work.
The first is responsiveness. If you need us, we are there. Most of our firm's operations are automated, which means our lawyers are not buried in admin. They are dealing directly with your issues, with the headspace to actually think about them.
The second is operating like a startup, with the tools to match. Notion pages, Slack channels, Teams calls. The same stack the founders and operators we advise already work in. Costs are fixed-fee where we can, transparent where we cannot, and never a surprise.
We are also deliberate about what we do. Corporate, commercial, employment and early dispute resolution are our lanes. That focus is itself part of the service. Our entire energy goes into the things businesses need on a regular basis, not spread thin across litigation, family or property work.
Ex-top-tier lawyers operating like a startup. Direct relationships, cost discipline, modern tools, and a tight scope. That combination is what our clients keep telling us they could not find elsewhere.
How do you innovate and stay ahead of industry trends?
I treat Zed Law the way a good operator treats a scale-up. Measure everything, automate the repeatable, and invest the hours back into work that actually requires judgement.
We are sitting at around 80% automation of firm operations today. Intake, CRM maintenance, invoice filing, payment reconciliation, weekly pipeline reviews that scan every lawyer's email and Slack across every active matter. None of that work was ever really "lawyering". Removing it freed the team to do the work that is.
A lot of that infrastructure I have built myself. I run at home an always-on server hosting our internal RAG stack, with MCP servers connecting AI tools into our practice management, document store, email and Slack. I write the glue in various coding tools and implement them myself. It means a senior lawyer at the firm can pull a first draft, a precedent or an answer to a complex question with full firm-wide context in seconds. Not because we bought a product off the shelf, but because we built the system around how we actually practise.
Learning to work in software and engineering was not a side project. It was the only credible way to make sure senior lawyers spend their time on strategy rather than admin. The legal work has not disappeared, it has moved upstream. Strategic thinking, client relationships, complex problem-solving, judgement on the grey areas. That is where the value has always sat, and now it is the only thing clients want to pay for as the models get sharper.
I stay close to the substantive market the same way. By being in the venture rounds, founder buy-backs, large capital markets deals and AI governance questions clients are bringing to us right now. The best way to stay ahead of a trend is to be one of the people setting it.
What is the toughest challenge you've faced in your role? How did you overcome it?
Rebuilding a law firm's operating model while running a busy commercial practice is the hardest thing I have done.
You cannot take a firm offline for a quarter to "do a transformation". Client work has to ship on time, the lights have to stay on, partners still have to bill, and on top of that the engineering work that actually makes the automation real has to happen somewhere. Doing it all at once means living with constant trade-offs and a real risk of getting stretched too thin.
The way through has been ruthless prioritisation, strong deputising, and a willingness to build in public. I pick two or three bets a quarter that are worth the disruption, get them shipped, and stabilise before the next wave. I have also had to be very honest with myself about what I am not willing to compromise. Client outcomes. Professional standards. The wellbeing of the team. Time with my wife on the farm. Within those guardrails, almost everything else is negotiable, and that clarity is what has let us move quickly without anything important breaking.
What are some of your goals for the next 5 years?
Three, in ascending order of ambition.
First, to operate a substantially automated commercial law firm. Not just the back office, but a meaningful portion of service delivery itself. The point is not to remove lawyers from the equation. It is to make every hour of lawyer time count for more.
Second, to keep building Zed Law into a firm that ex-top-tier lawyers actively want to join, and where clients come because they want the way legal practice should be done in the 2020s and 2030s, not the model carried over from the last century. A team small enough to stay close, strong enough that none of us is running on empty, and made up of people who think like owners rather than employees.
Third, to push the conversation about legal tech in the direction that actually matters. Most of the hype today is about tech that makes lawyers more efficient. Useful, but the client rarely sees the benefit. The real prize is technology that genuinely lowers the cost of accessing high-quality legal advice for businesses and consumers alike. No matter how far the technology goes, the most important parts of law (the oath, the trust, the consequences) will always be irreducibly human. But access to good advice should not be. That is the future I want to help build.
