Waymaker Wednesday: Women in LegalTech – Meet Spriha Bhandari

This week in our Waymaker Wednesday series, we’re spotlighting Spriha Bhandari, Assistant Director at the Cyril Shroff Centre for AI, Law and Regulation and Assistant Dean & Professor at Jindal Global Law School.

Spriha stands at the intersection of law, technology, and design, shaping how the next generation of lawyers understand and build for the digital era. With deep experience in technology law, AI regulation, and human-centered legal innovation, she brings together academia, practice, and product thinking in a way few others do.

Her career reflects a rare blend of hands-on legal practice and academic leadership. From advising startups and founders on emerging technologies like GenAI to designing frameworks for data privacy, cybersecurity, and agile policy-making, her work focuses on making law more adaptive, accessible, and design-driven.

A Cornell Tech LLM graduate, she previously led NLP and Legal Engineering projects at Zenlaw, where she worked with interdisciplinary teams of data scientists and AI experts to design contract analytics systems powered by custom legal ontologies. Earlier, as the Founder of Azytah Techh, she developed early prototypes of digital tools for lawyers and courts.

Through her multifaceted career, she continues to explore how law, technology, and human behavior intersect, proving that the future of legal innovation lies not just in algorithms, but in how we design systems that serve people.

Her journey embodies what it means to be a true waymaker, pushing boundaries, questioning conventions, and shaping the next chapter of LegalTech with clarity, curiosity, and purpose.

Here’s a peek into her world:

1. What inspired you to join the Women in LegalTech community?

It’s a vibrant, active and diverse community where one has so much to learn from. I have long admired the work that ILTN is doing and earlier this year had the chance to get acquainted with Shreya and Nimrat, whom I now call friends. They’re both putting in such great efforts into moving the needle in this space. At the very chance I got, I wanted to do my bit and bring to the table whatever experience I can. One would be surprised to see how women are leading this space in India, as CIOs of law firms, Head of Legal Tech in companies, and as legal tech founders! It’s a very inspiring cohort to be a part of.

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2. If you could solve one problem in the legal world (or beyond) with technology, what would it be?

If I could, I would build justice tech solutions. I prototyped a few in the past, and possibly sometime in the future would again get back into it. Justice administration is a very exciting system to build for. But for anyone looking to solve problems, one needn’t do something out of the ordinary. We just need to identify problems or areas that could be improved. It could be in the daily workflow one follows at work, or some service we encounter as users. We can identify problem statements wherever we are - I end up building for whatever subject I teach at law school and that shows that every single statute, every single workflow in law can be the focal point for innovation.

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3. What’s one book, podcast, or resource that’s made a big impact on how you think about work or life?

Actually, several books - but in the last couple of years, Breaking the Habit of Being You by Joe Dispenza, The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman, Source Code by Bill Gates to name some in my list. Also a show that I absolutely love, it’s on design: Abstract, on Netflix. Joe Dispenza has done some great work on the mind and how inner work can really positively transform lives. Don Norman’s is a classic on design: it has stood the test of time and the principles in the book apply to UI, UX, HCI as beautifully as they do to physical product design. Source Code is a brilliant read, it speaks to the mother in me. Shows how intentional and present parenting enables children to really blossom into who they truly can be. And the show, Abstract, covers the work ethic, styles, values, systems, and processes of brilliant, trailblazing artists across different verticals. So much to learn!

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4. Outside of work, what’s something you’re passionate about or love spending time on?

I enjoy a lot of art. My son and I paint together, we do a lot of craft work. We sing and dance. The stage of life I am in right now, just naturally everything outside of work gets blended with what I do with my son. It’s been a conscious choice and something I cherish the most about my life.

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5. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received as a woman in your career journey?

Not as a woman particularly, but just as someone who comes from a non-technical background, I was told to not think twice and to build! To just go and build, create, prototype- this was something my professor at Cornell Tech told me: Prof. Ed Walters, who is a lawyer, law professor, and has also built Fastcase! Today, building is much easier, faster for people who don’t code with all the GenAI tools available. What would take a whole team of engineers to build in a span of weeks, you can now do in hours. Ofcourse, provided, you have your ideation and other processes of design thinking sorted. This is not to say that one can go to market without a tech team, but the journey from idea to prototype has become shorter and so much easier. This speed and ease of getting to a prototype allows one to test and iterate much faster, in a way more effective manner. Today’s prototypes are high fidelity prototypes but can be used for testing, validation and iteration in way that we used to use low-fi ones in 2017/2018.

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6. If you weren’t working in law/legaltech, what’s another path you could totally see yourself in?

As much as I have always loved Art and Design, I have found Law to be my centre. So if nothing related to Law and Legal Tech, then possibly Service Design or perhaps just creating Art. I have to add however that, it may not be a this or that. One should follow all fields that call out to them. Some can turn into side projects, some can be hobbies.

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Spriha’s journey demonstrates how legal innovation is most powerful when grounded in human-centered problem solving. She continues to inspire as a leader who bridges academia, technology, and real-world impact, shaping systems, not just theories.

Are you a woman shaping the future of legal tech? We’d love to hear your story. Our Women in LegalTech community is a space to connect, inspire, and spark conversations that matter. Click here to join and be part of the movement.