Partner Shilpa Bhandarkar heads up Linklaters’ client tech & AI offering. She is CEO of the firm’s flagship contracting platform CreateiQ and co-chairing its Gen AI steering group. She was promoted to the firm’s global partnership in March this year.
She started her legal career as an energy and infrastructure and then corporate lawyer, before moving into entrepreneurship. In her time at Linklaters, she has served as the firm’s India COO and Africa business manager between 2008 and 2015 and was head of innovation from 2018 to 2020.
Here, she sits down with Law.com International to discuss being entrepreneurial in law, having a non-linear career path and relying on women in the tech community.
What prompted you to move from practising law and into legal tech?
I became a lawyer because, like many South Asian kids, I was heavily encouraged (i.e. required!) to pick a professional degree after high school. I got into med school, spent a day shadowing a doctor, threw up three times and then decided law was easier—much less blood and far fewer needles involved.
There’s about 10 years between leaving the practice and getting into legal innovation. In that time, I acquired an MBA, tried a few business management roles in law, founded and sold a mobile app company and spent time at a legaltech start-up in its run up to raising a series A round. The route from practice to innovation has definitely been more ‘jungle gym’ than linear.
Some of this was by design (I’m bought in to the potential of technology to make things better and easier) and some by circumstance (having children, multiple country moves, husband’s career moves etc).
The path since I ventured into legal innovation hasn’t been linear either. The scope of my role since I rejoined Linklaters in 2018 has changed every year. I love it though, a chance to keep learning, growing, evolving; keeps me on my toes.
What drew you to entrepreneurship in law?
Before I discovered the legaltech world, entrepreneurial lawyers found themselves in roles that involved building practices and product lines in new and emerging markets, or designing new legal products. I was very much in the former camp, first focused on our India practice and then our Africa one.
I paid for business school selling Indian art online; I topped up my start-up income by flipping properties; I’ve always had side ‘projects’ that allowed me to scratch the entrepreneurial itch even when I wasn’t in the space full time. And in my ‘day’ jobs, I’ve always tried to find work I enjoy. I started my legal career as an E&I lawyer because that’s what I cared about—building tangible assets like airports and bridges.
As my interests evolved, so did the roles. The massive advantage of working at a firm like Linklaters is that there’s always opportunity to try your hand at new things, to grow.
What challenges have you faced in having a non-linear career path?
The challenges have all largely been in my own head. In comparison to many of the people I work with—deeply technical lawyers and technologists who have honed their craft over many years—my skills sometimes feel generalist, and therefore fungible. Not great for my self-esteem!
But I’m lucky to have worked with people who have valued those skills, sometimes even before I did, and created opportunities and platforms to leverage them.
As a woman in tech, what annoys you most about the sector? And is there an aspect of the sector you’ve come to appreciate?
The fact that there aren’t nearly enough of them, particularly in technical roles. As an example, there are several women in technical roles at CreateiQ. Each has had a different route into the space. It would be good to have more direct access!
We need to start addressing that at all levels—in schools and educational institutions that develop talent and show young people what is possible; at companies where we recruit and create job opportunities, in investment firms that can help female founders access capital.
On the flipside, I really appreciate, and rely on, the incredible community that is women in tech, whether those communities have grown around large companies or in the start-up space, or even in the legaltech vertical, the women who are in these spaces are strong, supportive, collaborative, vocal, generous with their time and determined to make change. It’s incredibly energising to be part of that.
What does partnership in your role mean for your career?
Linklaters has invested in client tech and innovation for many years now. Our more recent investments in generative AI and in CreateiQ represent the opportunities we see in AI and legal tech more broadly. I’ve been leading this offering for a while and so the promotion to partner feels like a natural next step, in keeping with and recognising our culture and ambition of being a tech-enabled, forward looking firm.
In terms of what it means for my career: I now get to do more of what I enjoy. Laila, our genAI chatbot, has crossed 4,000 users who between them are generating , on average, 20,000 prompts each week. Our genAI training has been a massive success and we’ve been sharing our approach and learning with many of our clients. We launched CreateiQ 2.0 earlier this month. I have a feeling all of this will keep me busy.
What are the main risks and opportunities facing law firms and their leaders right now?
Given where we are in the hype cycle, I’d say genAI still poses a significant risk. It still hallucinates—and likely always will; that’s the nature of the tech—there are literally hundreds of start-ups claiming they have designed the ultimate tool for legal, it’s difficult to keep track; ensuring that the ones we want to pilot meet our information security standards—there are many risks.
But it also presents an opportunity to reimagine and redesign how we deliver legal services, and we get to do that in collaboration with our clients, who are on a similar journey themselves. And that’s a massive opportunity.
What advice would you give to young lawyers starting out?
Work out what you enjoy doing. Find roles that match that brief and start learning. E.g. if you’re a very structured thinker who likes people and has an interest in psychology and human behaviour, you’re likely to enjoy product management roles. If you like the logic of legal documents and processes, you might enjoy legal engineering.
I was recently on a panel with Dr Anne Marie Imafidon and something she said really resonated: take the ‘lean start-up’ methodology, and apply it to yourself. Treat your career like a start-up. Building on her idea, I would say, build your skills, measure your enjoyment, your progress, learn from the experience, good or bad, and then start again.
What’s your proudest professional moment? And have you had a worst day on the job?
A single ‘worst day’ doesn’t stand out. I’ve had many tough days. It comes with the territory.
Ditto my proudest moment. If you had asked me three weeks ago, I would have said making partner at Linklaters. Two weeks ago, it was the launch of CreateiQ 2.0. Last week it was the amazing feedback and engagement we’ve seen around the launch of our firmwide genAI training. Next week, it’s likely to be something else.
