My legal life: Tara Waters, Ashurst

Law was never on my radar growing up. I always thought I’d end up in the arts. Going into university I had designs on becoming a writer. Ultimately, I did start out in a slightly more creative area – working at a dotcom consultancy where I helped build new online businesses.

In the early 2000s, the tech sector was very different from today (although the relationship tech has with the law was, and has remained, the same). As changes in technology outpace the law, there is a continuous need to infuse the legal industry with technological knowledge. So when a friend in 2005 suggested that I might make a good lawyer due to my knowledge of tech, I thought why not. Four years and two legal degrees later (a JD from Fordham University and an LLM from Université Panthéon-Assas), I found myself in London working as a US capital markets lawyer.

My choice to move to London was similarly driven by a ‘why not’ mentality. I was changing careers so it made sense that I would also change location. I had to move away from expectations of becoming a ‘cool tech lawyer in NYC’ and focus on corporate finance. The first few years involved a steep learning curve but I ended up excelling. I also did my best to capitalise on opportunities to be involved in deals with tech-focused companies. This worked to my advantage and I was able to broaden my experience and turn my tech career into my superpower.

My legal career has taken a different trajectory to most lawyers, who tend to narrow their specialisation over time. My goal was to become a broad-based corporate practitioner with a specialisation in the technology sector. I went from doing solely US capital markets, to being able to advise on US and UK capital markets, private and public M&A, JVs and investments. I was lucky to end up at a firm like Ashurst, which not only allowed me to achieve my goals but supported me throughout my career journey.

Rather quickly, I was able to bring the benefits of my two careers to the firm. Initially, it was very legal services-focused. As the digital economy became a core industry focus I was able to work collaboratively with the new team brought in to lead in this space. I was also successful in bringing my local tech industry contacts to bear and, ultimately, co-founded our global high growth and VC practice. However, as the firm started investing more in our own tech-related capabilities – initially through the building of a more traditional legal tech function in Ashurst Advance and later in the creation of a digital products team – it became clear that I had found the place to plant my flag and make my career.

'We need to cultivate a more digital-friendly culture. It remains too easy to fall back into old ways of working when we don’t trust tech to do its job'

Working in the digital operations space opened my eyes to the real inner workings of law firms and how important cross-functional collaboration is to leading change. The challenges I faced in the early years, trying to work across silos and better align our activities to our strategic goals, led me to conclude that we needed a firm-wide plan for getting more digital. I was successful in convincing our board and executive team of this. I was honoured to be asked to help craft our digital plan and then to lead it as the firm’s first global chief digital officer.

Not many law firms have a chief digital officer role and I thought it important that we have one. First, I felt becoming more digital was of sufficient importance that a single person needed to be accountable. Second, I felt that the business needed a strong voice and guiding hand with experience in successful execution who also cared about us getting more digital. I don’t see this as a job – it’s a mission that I am wholly dedicated to. Finally, I wanted to avoid promising ‘innovation’ or ‘transformation’ (commonly used in law firm job titles). Developing the right digital capabilities should support innovation-related activities and ultimately lead to some form of transformation, but is not what drives the need for my role.

We are working on specific initiatives to help us reach our digital goals. I work day-to-day with lawyers, programme and project managers, service designers, product managers and operational teams across the firm to deliver against these initiatives. But we also need to cultivate a more digital-friendly culture. It remains too easy to fall back into old ways of working when we don’t trust the tech to do its job or we don’t know how to use our digital capabilities most effectively.