Kelly Jones is a Senior Legal Technology Consultant with the Integrated Legal Solutions (ILS) for Allens. For SATLA’s Careers Spotlight, we talked to Kelly about her background as a criminal lawyer and subsequent work in legal tech, and the role of technology in reshaping the legal industry.

Q: Can you tell us a bit about working in legal technology? What made you pursue a career in the field?

KJ: I work in Legal Technology. I am a Senior Consultant within the Integrated Legal Solutions team at Allens. Integrated Legal Solutions is part of the broader Innovation and Digital Solutions team. I've worked in this team for almost 6 years and have been in my current role for the past year. I am a lawyer by training and I was a criminal defence lawyer back in the UK. When I moved to Australia in late 2011 I was looking for a career change. I knew that I needed to do more study to be admitted in a jurisdiction here but I wasn't sure that I wanted to practice. I started working for a company that provided legal support and technology solutions to law firms, government departments and other businesses. To start with, I was doing a lot of paralegal/clerk type work, but I quickly gained exposure to tasks that involved more technical solutions such as getting documents ready for electronic databases. During my time there, I did more and more work on projects that involved managing documents and data for electronic databases and could see this type of work would continue to grow.

Q: Do you foresee technology becoming a larger factor in your work? In what ways does it impact your field?

KJ: More and more of the matters we work on involve large document volumes. It is definitely not uncommon to have a matter where there are at least thousands of documents for legal teams to potentially look at. Technology is developing all of the time and it's exciting to think of the possibilities. At Allens, we explore new technologies that enter the market and how we might best use them for our legal teams. Our Legal Product Lab also co-creates solutions for our clients and legal teams. For some lawyers using a database is using technology on their matter, for others it means looking at whether we can utilise technology to assist the review of the documents. As mentioned previously, all matters are different so we always consider which technology will provide us with the best return on review efficiency. Whilst it would be lovely to use all of the tools at our disposal on every matter, part of the Senior Consultant's role is to advise the legal team which solution is the best fit for their matter.

Q: What are the career opportunities in legal technology? Are you able to recommend some career opportunities/types of jobs that you think may be a good starting point for someone looking to enter your field after having finished law school?

KJ: If you are interested in a career in legal technology, I'd recommend thinking about the transferable skills learnt at law school that you'd be able to use on the job every day: skills like time management, critical thinking, working with others and your knowledge of legal processes. Recognise that at the outset, you don’t know what you don't know in terms of technology. Emphasise what you do know and really draw on those transferable skills. Lots of people working in this field fell into it or arrived here by various routes. For example, some have started their career with Allens in a practice group and have taken up roles in the legal technology space. There's not a linear path to follow but most people start out in an analyst role where you are responsible for maintaining databases, document management and that sort of thing before taking on a more advisory/consulting role. Don’t panic about learning how to code!

Hear more from Kelly Jones and life at Allens in SATLA’s Careers Spotlight which you can download here. Stay updated on further news and opportunities in science and technology law by becoming a SATLA member at satla.net/join and by following SATLA on Facebook or LinkedIn.