Innovating for Equality: Catalyzing Opportunity for Women in Law through Digital Transformation & AI

Women worldwide face inequality and barriers in law, whether at work where they are excluded from top leadership roles, encounter bias, unequal pay, navigate inflexible working environments and more or in accessing law and justice to fulfill their legal needs. AI transformation threatens to amplify inequality and barriers and is already bringing new harms. It is also catalyzing tectonic shifts in the legal sector, presenting historic opportunity to combat inequality, inequity, exclusion, and bias inherent in the legal and justice systems and workplaces of today as new systems, types of organizations, solutions, and products are built.  Urgent action to support women in law is needed as AI supercharges this opportunity and global frameworks are reimagined, new public and private sector institutions are built, and market forces stimulate intense activity and shift paradigms. 

Around the world, women are seizing opportunities, turning to entrepreneurship or pioneering innovation and digital transformation in their institutions and even their countries. Notably this group includes numerous women lawyers who have left roles in traditional legal institutions to pursue the many benefits offered by new organizations and roles, including to escape barriers they face in reaching leadership roles and their full potential in traditional legal institutions. 

Fully harnessing the opportunity requires robust, timely efforts to empower and support more women to lead the new AI era of law, engage in law-related entrepreneurship, and forge future facing careers. Vigorous, rapid action is needed to ensure diversity and equal representation among new artificial intelligence bodies especially those implicating law, e.g., governance, apply a gender lens to investments and procurement in the sector, expand access to finance, and deploy aggressive efforts to capacitate, empower, and support women in these fields.

Strong women’s leadership is also pivotal to maximizing the opportunity of Al to build “new” legal and justice systems, institutions, and solutions designed to incorporate the needs and values of women. Challenges women face in addressing legal needs and accessing justice are well-documented in some countries, but efforts to understand and incorporate women’s perspectives, values, and preferences for outcomes and solutions are more nascent. Women’s perspectives on what constitutes “good legal solutions and outcomes” can diverge from those offered by the male designed and dominated systems of today. Women-led efforts to broaden and deepen this understanding and incorporate the results in the design of new systems, institutions, solutions, and products is essential to shifting paradigms to respond to the needs of the 4 billion women worldwide.

Our groundbreaking report examines the careers and professional experiences of 105 women leaders in legal innovation, legal tech and digital transformation in law from 31 countries with the objective of understanding the potential of digital and AI transformation in law to empower and elevate women in law,  support them in workplaces, catalyze their access to economic opportunities in artificial intelligence, other emerging technology, and legal entrepreneurship and expand women’s access to law and justice more generally.

It concludes with a Blueprint and call to action to power women to work at the forefront of transformation in law.

Key Findings:

• Women’s Motivations for Joining Legal Innovation & Legal Tech:  
  • Many are drawn to legal innovation and legal tech to pursue an innovation to solve a legal problem observed in their work.
  • Others are motivated by their own experiences with the legal system or a legal issue.
  • Often women pursue legal innovation or entrepreneurship to take their career to new heights. For them, the potential opportunities seem more promising than what is available to them in their current roles.
  • Other professionals in the advanced stages of successful legal careers pivot to launch a new chapter applying their experience and expertise to solve legal problems in new innovative ways.
  • Several women interviewed for this report indicated being motivated by a desire to improve their work-life balance or obtain more flexibility through new types of roles in the legal field.
• Pathways to Legal Innovation, Legal Tech, and Digital Transformation:
  • Career pathways in legal innovation, legal tech, AI, and digital transformation in law are undefined.
  • Entry to these fields begins in various places with most lawyer entrants beginning their careers practicing law in traditional settings such as law firms, companies, in government, or at nonprofits before transitioning to legal innovation or legal tech.
  • Some business professionals and technologists work in traditional legal settings before transitioning to legal innovation and legal tech.
  • Nearly all women interviewed reported pioneering their own path without formal support. Many reported “bootstrapping” their transitions, educating themselves through networking and online learning platforms such as Coursera and You Tube, and reading books.
• Challenges and Barriers Faced by Women in Legal Innovation, Legal Tech, and Digital Transformation in Law:
  •  Women pioneering legal and justice innovation, AI and legal tech and digital transformation face numerous professional and personal challenges and barriers. These exist across a broad spectrum of areas and are often interrelated and intersectional.
  • The report found that challenges and barriers include:
    

    Lack of Mentorship	Lack of Role Models	Access to Finance
    Lack of career transition support	Bias, Discrimination & Harassment	Access to Human Capital
    Lack of Community Support	Gaps in Education & Training	Limited Visibility & Influence
    Limited Awareness of the Field & Career Pathways	Inadequate entrepreneur support	Access to Care

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