What does meaningful progress for women in legal tech actually look like?
You both lead legal tech communities in very different markets. What similarities have you seen in the opportunities and challenges facing women, regardless of geography?
CHIOMA: Across markets, one of the clearest similarities is that women are doing significant work in legal tech, but their visibility, access to decision-makers and proximity to capital do not always reflect the scale of that contribution. Whether the market is established or still developing, women often face the same underlying challenge: being invited into the conversation is not the same as having real influence over budgets, product direction, investment decisions or institutional strategy.
Photo: Chioma Wilson-Dike
Photo: Shreya Vajpei
At the same time, the opportunities are substantial. Legal tech is still a relatively young sector, which means many of its structures, networks and leadership pathways are still being formed. Women are not entering a completely fixed system; they have an opportunity to shape how the industry develops, which problems it prioritises and who benefits from the solutions being built.
Another similarity is the importance of community. In both established and emerging markets, women benefit from spaces where they can exchange practical knowledge, access introductions and learn from people who have already navigated fundraising, procurement, leadership, product development and growth. However, community must go beyond visibility and encouragement. It should create access to clients, investors, mentors, collaborators and decision-makers.
There is also a shared need for more visible examples of women succeeding in different parts of the industry. Seeing women as founders, buyers, operators, investors, lawyers and technologists expands what others believe is possible. The real opportunity is to move from representation alone towards meaningful participation, influence and ownership across the legal tech ecosystem. That shift is needed everywhere.
SHREYA: I keep waiting for geography to matter more than it does. I founded the Indian LegalTech Network, Chioma builds in Nigeria, I work in London now, and I expected each move to feel like a different story. It’s mostly the same story with different weather.
A woman can hold a CXO title and slowly realise the actual decisions got made in rooms she wasn’t invited to, on evenings she wasn’t there for. The title is real butt the power isn’t.
Law firm innovation teams, meanwhile, are full of women, which looks like the good news until you ask how everyone got there. Many of the women I know came through the PSL route, and that was long the path for women when partnership track and a life outside work turned out to be incompatible. I’m genuinely not sure how much of that pipeline was choice. Even our best ratio has an asterisk on it.
And underneath everything, the family penalty. Sometimes direct, no promotion in a maternity year. More often quiet: left off the project, the conference, the client meeting, and nobody can quite say why.
But I’ve stopped being gloomy about one thing. The work these roles demand, bringing sceptical people along, managing change, relationships that survive a failed pilot, is work women keep proving they’re unusually good at. There’s a stack of research saying so if you want it. You can also just look around the room.
So, while some of us arrived through a pipeline we didn’t entirely choose and landed somewhere the work suits us – the question now is, whether organisations will attach power and budget to these roles?
When people hear “women in legal tech”, they often think of diversity initiatives. What do you think the industry still gets wrong about the conversation?
CHIOMA: The industry often treats “women in legal tech” as a diversity conversation rather than a business and innovation conversation. That framing can become limiting because it positions women as people who need support, rather than as founders, operators, buyers, investors, lawyers and technologists who are already shaping the market.
There is also a tendency to focus on representation without examining where power sits. It is useful to count how many women are on a panel or in a room, but the more important questions are who controls budgets, who leads procurement, who receives investment, who owns the product and who influences strategic decisions. Visibility matters, but it is not the same as authority or access.
Another mistake is creating women-focused spaces that are emotionally supportive but disconnected from commercial outcomes. Community matters, but it should also lead to practical opportunities: introductions to potential customers, access to senior sponsors, feedback on fundraising, advice on market entry, pathways into leadership and opportunities to shape products.
The conversation also needs to become more specific. Women in legal tech are not a single group with one set of needs. A student, a founder raising capital, a general counsel buying technology, a lawyer moving into an innovation role and a senior leader building a team will face different challenges. Broad statements cannot address all of them.
The industry needs fewer symbolic gestures and more targeted interventions that respond to those realities. The aim should be to help women participate fully in the commercial, strategic and technical decisions that shape legal tech, rather than simply ensuring they are visible around the edges of the conversation.
SHREYA: That ‘the initiative’ is the outcome.
I understand the appeal. A panel happens, a list gets published, an award gets handed out, and everyone goes home feeling like something moved. I’ve gone home feeling that way myself. Then you check: career trajectories, budgets, board seats, funding, who was in the room when the decision got made. Nothing moved.
The uncomfortable part is that the feeling might be the problem. The warm glow of the event takes the pressure off doing the thing the event was supposedly about. And I’m aware I’m saying this in the newsletter of a conference where I’m about to run a women in legal tech workshop, which tells you how tangled this gets.
The way I’ve made peace with it: an event is only worth having if something leaves the room that wasn’t there before. A sponsor. A changed mind. A woman who stops assuming she’s the only one.
Sponsors, by the way, not mentors. Mentors give you advice over coffee. Sponsors spend their own capital on you, say your name in the room you’re not in, take a hit if you fail. Most women have plenty of the first and almost none of the second, and past a certain point the second is the only thing that moves a career.
Your workshop at Legal Geek will be highly interactive. What do you hope participants will walk away with that they couldn't get from simply listening to a panel discussion?
We want participants to leave with something more useful than inspiration.
Panels have a ceiling. The conversation is limited to the people on stage, the audience stays largely passive, and everyone up there knows which version of their story is safe to tell. The workshop is designed to get underneath that. Participants will be able to test their thinking against the experiences of others in the room: how someone approached a difficult stakeholder, found a route into legal tech, built support for an idea, navigated a career decision or recovered from a setback.
We also want the session to make better use of the knowledge already in the room. Participants will come from different roles, markets and stages of their careers, and many will have insights that could help someone else. The expertise for this session isn’t at the front of the room. It’s already sitting in it, and our job is mostly to help it surface, be questioned and turned into practical learning.
Connection matters too. Rather than leaving with a list of names they heard speak, participants should be able to identify people they want to keep speaking with, for advice, collaboration or a shared professional challenge.
Most importantly, we want every participant to leave with greater clarity and a concrete next step. A conversation to initiate, a relationship to build, a question they are finally ready to ask. The value of the workshop should continue after the session ends.
Last year told us the appetite is there. Once the room understood the safe version wasn’t required, the conversation went places no panel goes, and the feedback was: more, longer, again.
Hear Chioma and Shreya live at Legal Geek Conference 2026 (14-15 October, London), alongside 250+ speakers from across the legal industry and beyond.
