Legaltech entrepreneur
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People Anatomy™
A spotter’s guide to the men and women of finance.
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A former managing associate from Latham & Watkins who, tiring of proof-reading confidentiality agreements at 2:30 am, has realised there must be a better way of earning a living — this much is certainly true — and has concluded that it will be by designing some software than can do that job instead. So, armed with some ropey javascript commissioned from a “developer” in Bucharest on the dark web, she has embarked on a glorious new business career as an aspiring new Mark Zuckerberg.
This is a smart idea because:
- (a) it is very easy to impress a general counsel with any technology more sophisticated than a pop-up toaster — all you do is say, “it runs on blockchain”;
- (b) the potential revenue, if you can sell your WordPress installation to any significant participant in the financial services industry is out of all proportion to the value the software could possibly deliver, but this doesn’t matter as long as the general counsel thinks it runs on blockchain and the RAG status for innovation in the ManCo deck is therefore green, since it will be the lawyers who will get blamed when it turns out not to work;
- (c) almost all reg tech is just as ropey, being either hastily cobbled PHP that runs on top of Google Docs; or hastily cobbled-together javascript that runs on top of a generic TensorFlow neural network.
Before you can say, “software as a service” you’ll be rocking brush-cotton check shirts, living out of a WeWork broom cupboard in Shoreditch while you angle for a place in Fuse and doing your own LinkedIn podcasts to the rapturous acclaim of other reg tech entrepreneurs.