Meet the lawyers of LawY: Shelley Burger

From engineering to lawyer to legal technology CEO

My story is an interesting one. I actually studied software engineering before I studied law. I worked at Gilbert & Tobin which is a compelling firm, and I spent the next 12 years in private practice. Eventually I reached a crossroads: stay in private practice, or move in-house. The opportunity to get closer to tech and merge both my tech background and legal expertise was very appealing. That's how I got out of private practice and into an in-house counsel role, eventually finding my way to LEAP.

Once I was at LEAP, opportunities to move sideways into product became more available. When AI came onto the scene in a major way, that's when I decided to make the leap. Law will always be there, but the opportunity to build something completely new; I hadn't seen it before, so I jumped at it.

When you're the entire legal team

As a single lawyer in my first in-house role, a typical day was keeping on top of my inbox; identifying and tracking all of the legal work that flowed from my internal stakeholders; reviewing, amending and drafting contracts or comms; and explaining legal concepts to people who aren't legally trained. It takes a while to get your head around your stakeholders and ever changing business needs, to synthesise key commercial concepts into the broader picture of a business and to translate those concepts into non-legal speak. Every day, there was generally more work to be done than I could get done as a one-woman-band. Prioritising and risk assessment became really important, as did using tech tools to help me get the lower-level work done as quickly as possible.

The greatest pressure flowed from the sheer volume of work; you know that the high value work is the interactions with your stakeholders like other executives and the board, but the low-level work never stoped rolling in. That's generally how all in-house counsel feel, there are never enough resources or hours in the day. Figuring out on the fly how to work smarter not harder was the key to my success.

Breaking the cycle of 'how it's always been done'

I would tell my younger self to find the time to seek out new tools rather than trying to do it the way it's always been done. If you do it that way, productivity isn't a focus. You've got to focus on the work as well as enhancing your productivity, and you've got to carve out the time to enhance your own productivity and do your own learning.

The advantage of building what you've lived

My experience as a practicing lawyer shapes the way I build LawY because I put myself back into my old shoes as a practicing lawyer. If we're building a new feature, a workflow or a process that the product will present to our users; I can recall the pain points and feed that information back into the design and development cycle. Then when we're looking at how a feature is responding, after enough years in the job, that experience informs my judgement as to whether the responses are inline with what our users want and need.

What the next five years will demand from lawyers

In five years, a lawyer would find it difficult to compete if they're not maximising their use of productivity tools in the market. Law is a difficult and time-consuming job, and you're expected to do a lot and churn out a lot of work in periods of time that are very challenging.

If you don't take the time to identify the low-value and/or repeatable work and use tools to increase your productivity in these places, you won’t have as much time to focus on the high-value work. A lawyer who is wisely using tools like AI will be producing more high-quality work than the one who's still trying to do it in the pre-AI, pre-legal tech tool kind of way. It is the high quality work which gets you noticed and moving up in your organisation!

Why LawY chose small firms over enterprise

I decided to focus on a product and on a company that services the small to medium-sized market for law firms because when I was in private practice, it was hard to see any real impact from my work. While you're learning, it's fun to be a part of multi-million dollar deals, but ultimately it's not as rewarding as being able to have an impact on the day-to-day law that the majority of the population uses.

Family law, property law, employment law; all the stuff that's done by smaller firm. The products we're building help more people, real people in a real way, by helping firms focus on their clients and spend more time on high-value work.

From labour-intensive to AI-accelerated

When I was in-house, drafting and review was incredibly labour-intensive. If you aren’t lucky enough to have a precedent library within a business, you have to start building that up or draft a clause from scratch. The first drafts, templates and clause extracts you can get out of a good AI tool these days are an amazing start to any drafting task. The speed, comprehensiveness and flexibility offered by modern tools would have halved my contract queue at the very least. That’s not even touching on the review and compare capabilities of modern tools!

The jump that changed everything

For me, the biggest achievement is actually making the successful jump from legal practice into legal tech. It's still fairly new and nothing is guaranteed in life, but having the opportunity to build a fantastic team that is as passionate about the product as I am is eminently rewarding. With a product out in the market and valuable to lawyers; I feel fortunate to have found the type of job satisfaction that I wasn’t sure I’d find again.

Three words that define the work

My role in three words: challenging, dynamic, and if I'm doing it right, impactful.