Hi, I’m Laura, I am an AG Integrate Consultant and I work with a retail and consumer goods company at the moment. I’m a technology lawyer by trade. I started life as a trainee at Addleshaw Goddard in the London office back in 2010 then I qualified at Addleshaws and spent some time in the Commercial team. Then I moved to a US law firm where I sat in the Technology Transactions Group, so really focusing in on emerging technology and big tech transactions. After I had my two children I decided to leave private practice and move to an in-house so I took a General Counsel position at Unilever, where I headed up their Marketing & Media Group globally. That was at exactly the same time that ChatGPT was launched globally and so I did a lot of AI work during that time and after that role came to an end, I decided to move into consulting and focusing on tech and AI problems for clients. 

What really attracted me to a contracting role was the flexibility that it offered. So I have two young children now and I felt that I wanted to spend a bit more time with them during school holidays and also to have more flexible working hours around school and stuff like that, so that was a big driver for me, but I was also really attracted at the prospect of working for lots of different companies and different clients and consulting gives me that opportunity in a way that being in one company, in-house, doesn’t give you.  

Advice I would give to someone thinking about becoming a Consultant with AG Integrate would be to really just go for it. You’ve really not got much to lose. It’s a fantastic way of starting life as a Consultant because you have the benefit of a big law firm behind you and a huge amount of support from the AG Integrate team which is absolutely fantastic. I would also recommend keeping an open mind around the types of assignments that you’re open to and also the different sectors that you're willing to work in because it could be a great opportunity for you to try out a different sector that you’ve not sat in before.  

Interim Consulting was really attractive to me because I had had a really great stint in-house in a senior position and that came to an end because it was an interim role and I was really looking for role that was flexible and that worked around my family commitments, but that was also interesting and kept me on my toes. Consulting is a really fantastic opportunity to work with different clients across different sectors and so it keeps every day interesting.  

I think some of the key benefits for clients who use Interim Lawyers in the ability to fill in gaps in the team very flexibly and very quickly. It's also to find skillsets that may be missing and its also a good opportunity for clients to bring someone into the team and to have essentially what is a good trial period to see if that person fits in with the team with the option to take them on permanently if it goes well.  

Using Interim Lawyers to help support a business’s adoption of AI is a really good idea. A lot of legal team’s compliance functions are really struggling at the moment to keep on top of the influx of demand coming from the business across all the different potential use cases of AI, so having a lawyer on an interim basis who can fill in that gap is an excellent way of keeping on top of demand. There’s increasing pressure on legal teams to cut costs but there is also increasing workload for legal teams, particularly with additional risks coming into the business around the adoption of AI.  

Another example of how Interim Lawyers could help in this is bringing specific skills that may be missing within the team. So for example, AI it sits across so many different legal issues, data privacy, intellectual property, contract law and compliance and not all teams are geared up in-house to cover all of those different issues so using an Interim Lawyer who has one of those specific skillsets can really again plug a nice gap in the team.

One of the biggest trends I've seen when working with my AG Integrate client is the need for legal teams to do more with less so there’s increasing pressure on legal teams to cut costs, but there is also an increasing workload for legal teams, particularly with additional risks coming into the business around the adoption of AI. 

AI is transforming the legal profession in so many different ways. One of the most interesting is the need for lawyers to really upskill in AI and that can be a real challenge cause AI technology is moving really quickly, as are the global regulations that cover this, so there is a need to continually upskill and keep up to date with what’s going on in the world. Also there is a huge proliferation of use cases that our clients are looking at and being able to understand those use cases and the risks that relate to those specific use cases is a huge challenge but one that lawyer are very well placed to meet.