Interview with Junior Lawyer and LegalTech Founder Annabel Pemberton

Hi Annabel, please share a brief background on where you are in your journey.

Hi Zainab! I'm currently a junior legal mind at Sparring, a startup‑focused firm. While I am training to be a lawyer now, I didn't always follow the legal path; I worked at a data startup as deputy data protection officer during and after my law studies at the University of Warwick.

In 2021, I returned to law and joined Sparring, a technology‑startup‑focused law firm. My data protection law experience helped me secure this role because it's essential for all technology startups. I'm currently studying for the New York Bar (a qualification route not discussed enough) and am therefore supervised in my legal practice inside the firm. As I am not pursuing the conventional UK training contract route, I do not have a defined path or a 'seats' structure inside the firm. I therefore work across the firm, assisting with data protection, intellectual property, contractual, corporate, and investment matters. My current work spans several legal areas. It includes corporate support for a new self‑custodial crypto wallet, contentious intellectual property, and legal research for a startup defining the future of gaming.

How did your previous experience help you during your TC? (Internships, pupillage, data protection role)

While studying, I was always searching for a role that combined my preference for creativity with problem‑solving and complexity. I therefore chose an alternative path: an internship at a data startup that became a part‑time, then full‑time, role in data protection law.

My day‑to‑day work focused on the startup's protection law agenda, from training employees on GDPR and CCPA to researching fast‑moving regulatory changes to advising our product teams on how to incorporate privacy‑by‑design. After this experience, I knew that I wanted to work in a more dynamic environment. It also prepared me to work alongside startups today, including their work style, entrepreneurial outlook, and a better understanding of technology. This experience also strengthened my belief in value and mission (over hours worked) and sparked my desire to improve our practice in the legal profession.

Being a trainee and working remotely has been different in many ways. How has this been for you, and do you have any tips you can share with other trainees?

Coming from the startup world, I was already fairly comfortable with remote work when I joined Sparring. However, even with this experience, my first few weeks were hard because my work was much more legal‑heavy than my data protection role. My team, however, accommodated our lack of in‑person meetings: I was invited to several pre‑joining welcomes, professional and informal team‑building sessions, frequent one-to-ones and daily stand‑ups covering both our professional and personal goals.

If you feel lost in your firm while working remotely, I recommend using a channel that lets you meet others, or asking your leader to set one up. In Slack, we have something called donut‑buddies (which randomly pairs you with a new person every week), and the team organised water‑cooler chats and lunch drop‑ins (we noticed ideas from spontaneity decreased during full remote working and tried to replicate this).

You have been busy co‑founding various exciting projects in the past year. Please share what they are and whether aspiring lawyers can get involved.

Last May, I started The Wired Wig podcast (TWW), a show that highlights the intersection of law and technology. Initially, I created the podcast to highlight how technology is regulated, as well as exciting career opportunities for students outside traditional routes. I also started the podcast as a project to stay engaged in technology law and network with others during lockdown. What started as laughing about my experience as the only student studying a literature‑based topic soon became a useful educational resource to inspire others to engage with these topics. I soon found that the law and technology and legal tech community is so willing to educate and support others, and I'm happy to be part of this by sharing my experience.

However, TWW is currently on pause because I'm co-leading another initiative. Law School 2.0 aims to give future lawyers more technological skills, experience, and knowledge to excel in the legal profession. This project was born out of a conversation I had with Catherine Bamford, legal engineer and CEO of BamLegal, at the end of last year. On Catherine'ss recommendation, I soon had a call with Amy Conroy and Nathan Corr about the idea, and we decided to organise the legal tech vacation scheme. After iterating the idea for a few months, I didn't really get the ball moving until June 2021, when we started working with our fantastic law school 2.0 team. Catherine is the mentor I would have loved to meet while studying law, and I owe her a huge shout-out for connecting me with Amy Conroy for The Wired Wig.

Lastly, in your opinion, what effect does technology have on the legal industry, and what advice do you have for students interested in this intersection?

Despite The Wired Wig being a top legal tech podcast, I didn't know what legal tech was until I interviewed legal tech tools. While this might bemuse people, the lack of education around technology use in legal practice is logical, given the traditional ways we are assessed: written exams, no laptops in moots, encouragement of note-taking,s and (at least for me) no online lectures. On the other hand, I was aware of the law of technology and how regulation challenged technology, as I engaged with this during my internship and startup role.

I can answer this in two parts: from a legal tech perspective and a law-and-technology perspective.

Firstly, technology is redefining how law firms work and how lawyers practise. While technology is not the only way to reduce inefficiencies in law firms and legal teams (we will show how technology is not always the answer in the legal tech vacation scheme), automation and tools can help teams deliver more value in less time, with greater accuracy and potentially less stress. This can lead not only to faster turnaround for clients but also to indirect benefits, such as trainees taking on responsibility earlier, lawyers having more time to advise clients on matters that require human interaction, and overall higher lawyer happiness. Finally, using legal tech to automate repetitive, low‑value tasks also challenges the principles the legal industry runs on, such as the billable hour and set working hours. Legal tech can therefore redefine the legal industry, making it more dynamic and prosperous for its workers.

Second, technology poses both benefits and challenges to everyday society. Even the technology lawyers use can raise ethical and legal challenges, such as algorithmic bias, discrimination, and black‑box methodologies. Therefore, the more advanced technology becomes, the legal profession will have to stay one step ahead in its decisions to (or not to) regulate emerging technologies. But these changes shouldn't come only from lawyers: regulatory decisions should include inputs from multidisciplinary teams, meaning lawyers will need to work with subject specialists, developers, designers, and others outside the law. Technology law therefore requires the legal profession to recalibrate and draw on multiple fields, giving tomorrow's lawyers a great opportunity to learn from other professions.

Many publications also address the intersection of law and technology, with The Artificial Lawyer, The Cyber Solicitor, and Automated as great places to start. Finally, for those who want a more academic path, more universities now offer master's programs specifically in law and technology and in computer science for lawyers.