Whilst traditional Australian legal practice means 7.5 hours of billable work, Stirling & Rose does 4.5 hours – and focuses on a number of other key areas.

“There’s three ways we do things differently. We do just bog-standard, straight, corporate legal advisory work, but with that digital bent. But the other thing we do is we will work on thought leadership. And we know that our clients want us to do that because it means we actually know what we’re talking about, and we understand what the really technical bottlenecks are to the next iteration of the law. And the third thing we do is we also prioritise client secondments. And the way we do that is through our GC as a service,” Ms Blycha said.

“So, you’re expected to work inside a client, and that can be in their product development. So, we’re very conscious that again, some things that have happened in the law in the last few years by computer scientists and lawyers, there’s a lot of discussion, which is plain wrong. And there aren’t a lot of bridge people who can tell when the law is being espoused incorrectly by a computer scientist or when the tech stack is being espoused incorrectly by the lawyer.

“So, what we do by going in and actually helping build the tech with clients, whether that’s through a carbon project, or whether that’s through a digital currency exchange project, or whether that’s just through a client who’s changing into a digital platform, you start talking sense.”

Particularly as the digital landscape is constantly changing and evolving, lawyers in this space are having to keep abreast of a wide variety of changes – which Ms Blycha said was both overwhelming and exciting.

“It is a tall order to know what’s coming and it’s a tall order to be paying attention to what’s coming, but it is needed. And there are clients that we have who are pushing boundaries. You can’t afford to have a lawyer who’s not going to push the boundary with you and want to walk there. And that’s what I’m saying is I think we’re prepared to get in the tent with you to understand what you need. That is obviously bringing a bit of discomfort to the lawyer themselves. But God, I don’t know any lawyers who don’t get a bit of discomfort serving their clients, having to push themselves,” she added.

“I think that the metaverse itself is a word. It’s a word that’s a bit of a cheesy word in many respects, but the concept of the society, economy, people, living within a digital version of themselves, that’s inevitable. And we don’t even know exactly how that will take form, but yeah, you were going to need some lawyers who will sit there. Digital law is not for everyone. It is for the curious, and being in the head of emerging tech, it’s definitely a personality type. And that does seem to be more of a founder personality type as well.”

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In addition to these kinds of digital evolutions, health and environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues are presenting a number of opportunities within the digital landscape.

“We as a planet are approaching a crisis in respect of the environment. And we all know that a lot of ways that government’s thinking we’re going to get out of this crisis is through technology, and actually being privy to people on the ground who are creating digital solutions to help with our march to net zero, that’s probably one of the most exciting things we get involved in. And then, I mean, gosh, some of it is just as easy as saying, when you hang out with founders, that’s a really interesting group of people too, I call it smash brains with, because you’re continually inspired to push boundaries just a little bit more. So, as I said, it can be across health. So, it’s people who are looking to say, okay, this is how we used to do health,” Ms Blycha added.

“Another one is agriculture. So, agriculture is something that has to date been done in quite a non-transparent way, where growers themselves don’t have a lot of power in respect of monopoly power of big buyers and agents. And that is an area that’s being digitised at the moment. Super interesting in terms of AI and looking at what’s happening on the ground, and then being able to take what’s happening on the ground and push it through supply chains, and all of the while using data collection and using AI to be able to then create efficiencies in the way that those assets are used in the future. So that’s pretty exciting and that’s got a lot of nuts and bolts behind it, and a lot of legal questions.”

The transcript of this podcast episode was slightly edited for publishing purposes. To listen to the full conversation with Natasha Blycha, click below: