Women in LegalTech: What Can Lawyers Build Anyway with Spriha Bhandari – Event Recap

Admin ILTN
Sep 30
4 min read

When we hosted Spriha Bhandari for a session on “What Can Lawyers Build Anyway?”, the conversation quickly turned into something more fundamental than legal tech. It became a discussion about myths, skills, and the mindset shifts lawyers need if they want to build — whether it’s a product, a process, or a completely new way of practicing law.

Here are the key insights from the session, reframed for any law student, young lawyer, or professional curious about the future of building in law and legal tech.

The Myths Lawyers Believe About Innovation

1. Only two career paths exist: corporate or litigation. Spriha started with a blunt truth: law schools traditionally present just two “respectable” choices — corporate law or litigation. Everything else is seen as a deviation. But that narrow frame ignores entire worlds of opportunity: legal design, legal tech, policy innovation, legal engineering, or even product building. Lawyers can (and do) build outside those two silos.

2. Lawyers aren’t creative. The second myth is even more limiting: the idea that lawyers lack creativity. Creativity, in this framing, is misunderstood as “making something look pretty” — formatting a brief, polishing slides, or aesthetics. Real creativity is about building: turning a messy problem into a structured solution, designing a product, or even reimagining legal workflows. Creativity in law is not about decoration — it’s about construction.

The Skills Law Students (and Lawyers) Should Invest In

Keep logical and analytical thinking alive. Ironically, the very skills that get students into law school — logical reasoning and analytical thinking — often atrophy once they are inside. Chasing grades, internships, and placements narrows the lens. Spriha argued that lawyers must keep their “logic hat” on at all times. If you can break a statute into decision trees, you already have the foundation for coding legal rules or structuring workflows.

Apply legal strategy consciously.

Beyond logic, lawyers must practice applying strategy deliberately. It’s not enough to prove you’re smart; you must show that you can structure an argument, frame a case, and think about outcomes in a systematic way. This strategic mindset translates directly to building products, processes, or services in the legal ecosystem.

Learn interdisciplinarity.

Building is never a solo legal exercise. Lawyers who want to innovate need to pick up transferable skills from other disciplines — marketing, product management, operations, even HR. A founder or product manager in legal tech may start out as “chief everything officer,” handling roles from user research to hiring, before growing into leadership. Exposure to these functions builds empathy and equips lawyers to thrive in cross-functional teams.

Get practical exposure.

Perhaps most importantly, Spriha stressed the value of doing. Reading theory is not enough. Join a project team, contribute to a prototype, or participate in law-school initiatives like mediation chatbots. Even if you’re not leading, being part of a building process is where you actually learn.

Do Lawyers Need Technical Skills?

This was one of the most pressing questions from the audience. Do lawyers need to code or master AI to build?

Spriha’s answer was clear: a tech background is no longer mandatory. A decade ago, creating a prototype required a tech team and specialized design tools. Today, platforms like Figma or Lovable let anyone create interactive prototypes in hours, not months. With the right problem statement, research, and feature design, a lawyer can use these tools to produce a working model — enough to test with users or even pitch to investors.

Of course, technical skills are still valuable. Understanding the basics of data, coding, or product lifecycles helps in communicating with engineers and evaluating feasibility. But they are secondary. What matters most is defining the problem, structuring the solution, and iterating based on user feedback.

The Rise of Interdisciplinary Roles

Legal tech is already opening doors to roles that didn’t exist a decade ago:

Legal Engineers, who translate law into machine-readable decision trees.
Legal Product Managers, who oversee research, user journeys, and feature design.
Legal Ops Professionals, who optimize processes, billing, and firm efficiency.
Legal Technologists, often hybrid roles bridging design, product, and engineering.

For students or lawyers aiming at these paths, preparation means experimenting with different tasks, finding your fit, and building communication skills. Reading widely, networking across disciplines, and asking good questions at startup or industry events are concrete ways to prepare.

The Core Takeaway: Start Doing

If there’s one message Spriha emphasized, it’s this: lawyers should start doing.

Innovation doesn’t begin with a certification or a perfectly written plan. It starts with action. Build a prototype. Join a team. Test an idea. Even a small contribution to a project will teach you more than a semester of theory.

The legal profession often rewards risk aversion — but building rewards experimentation. By combining their core strength (logic) with interdisciplinary learning and a bias toward action, lawyers can prove that they are not just interpreters of law, but builders of the systems that deliver it.

Final Thoughts

The future of legal practice will not be defined solely by courtroom advocacy or corporate deals. It will be shaped by those who build — tools, processes, platforms, and even new kinds of legal services. The myths that hold lawyers back are just that: myths.

As Spriha put it, the question isn’t “can lawyers build?” The real question is: “when will you start?”