What made you decide to join JustLawyers?
Without a doubt, the people involved. I’ve learned important lessons from my previous businesses, one of them being that the success of a startup usually comes down to timing and the team. Knowing if the timing is right for a new product is difficult, but figuring out if your business partners are the right ones is much simpler. When I decided it was time to look for a new project, I wasn't searching for a specific niche or sector. I was looking for co-founders who had the attitude, skills, and mindset that I think are necessary to build something. Without a doubt, Isabel and Sebastiaan have it. On top of that, they have spent years in this sector and know exactly what the problems and customer pains are. It wasn't a difficult decision at all.
Personally, I know nothing about the legal industry, which made the prospect of joining JustLawyers even more interesting.
After meeting the team and seeing the product, where did you see the biggest opportunity?
If a founder cannot explain their value proposition clearly in 15 seconds, or if it takes longer to understand, it is usually a bad sign. Isabel explained me the value of JustLawyers in 10 seconds, and it made immediate sense to me. Lawyers need to be open to change to move up in their careers, but it is often difficult to look for new jobs discreetly due to the tightly-knit nature of the legal community and the risk of conflict with their current firms.
As a complete outside observer, the legal industry looks to me like a business with very tight specializations. If a firm operates in the IP space, for instance, you cannot just hire any lawyer. You need to find and attract profiles with that exact experience. That is no easy task. If you can help reduce this fragmentation, you create massive value for both lawyers and law firms. JustLawyers focuses on solving this problem for young lawyers and law students —digital and AI-native profiles who are already looking for a more direct and dynamic way to advance their careers, bypassing traditional headhunters and standard CV submissions.
The most obvious opportunity here is scalability. If the market is ultra-competitive and fragmented here in Belgium, chances are young lawyers in France, the Netherlands, and the UK are facing the exact same challenges. Obviously, AI opens up opportunities, but not because it automates hiring decisions, actually, the opposite. It helps us optimize how we put candidates and law firms in direct contact by cutting out the administrative paperwork. From there, both sides can just use human common sense to see if they are a good match.
Everyone is talking about AI. Which changes do you believe are real, and which are mostly hype?
We developers and technical professionals have had a front-row seat to AI changes over the past two or three years. Take software development, there is simply no justification to keep working the way we did two years ago. If you did, you’d be fired or out of business in days.
The job has changed completely, and I think it's for the better. AI helps us ship faster, software is more robust, and bugs are found and fixed more efficiently. It allows us to create value we simply could not deliver before. If a customer needs a specific customization or has a unique requirement, serving them might have been prohibitively expensive in the past. Today, we can branch out the main code and deliver the customization highly efficiently. Everybody wins.
Other professions are going to start experiencing what developers went through at high speed. This will create confusion, doubt, and the necessity to relearn and reinvent daily processes and workflows. Ultimately, though, I believe that creative destruction will give people new tools to serve their customers more effectively with fewer errors and greater speed.
Is there hype around AI? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that AI is now being bolted on top of everything, even where the value creation is questionable. No, in the sense that it is a major technological revolution, most likely the biggest ever. Was there hype around the combustion engine in 1860? Probably. Was there hype around the internet in the 90s? A lot. The hype eventually transforms into new ways of living and working that everybody adapts to and benefits from.
As CTO, what are your priorities for the next 12 months?
The job of a CTO is to make good technical decisions. That’s it. In a way, it is easier than what CEOs, sales, or marketing teams have to do, because we can usually benchmark and measure the cost and performance of different options very precisely.
Technical decisions have to maximize value for clients at a cost that doesn't hurt company growth. Whether it is software or hardware, we must build the product so that it does what it is supposed to do while remaining flexible and as cost-effective as possible. We want to avoid over-engineering. As awkward as it may sound: we must push capital away from IT. Resources must go to growth, marketing, and used efficiently to discover and build features people actually need. Not wasted on massive cloud bills or a dozen unnecessary third-party integrations.
AI tools for development puts us in a great position because we can test and iterate on new ideas very quickly. We have already had instances where we came up with an idea on Monday and had it was live in production by Thursday. If customers like it, great. If they don't, we take it out and move on to the next idea. Because of this, my priorities are straightforward: listen to what users say and look at how they use JustLawyers, then make the right technical calls to make the product better and the company growing.
What's one prediction about AI that most people would disagree with today?
There are so many voices and contradictory opinions out there that it is hard to know what most people even agree on. However, one comment I see repeatedly is that AI will destroy the first step of the career ladder. The rationale, I suppose, is that automating entry-level and junior roles will make it hard for beginners to gain foundational experience. I think that argument is based on a fallacy the idea that beginners need administrative, grunt work to learn a trade. In reality, the lack of an efficient way to handle bureaucratic, repetitive and ‘soul-crushing’ tasks was used to justify having bright and enthusiastic young people sit around all day shuffling papers and copying data from an Excel spreadsheet to a Word document.
AI is not destroying the first step of the career ladder; it is changing what those steps are. Young, AI-native profiles will come in and prompt away the mindless repetitive tasks in minutes, leaving the rest of the day to actually learn the language, conventions, and methods of their industry. Entry level tasks in 5 years are probably tasks that engineers are doing today. What is changing is the nature of the entry-level positions. The ladder is getting shorter, but the wall you are trying to climb is also getting shorter.
If we're having this conversation again in three years, what would you love to have achieved at JustLawyers?
I hope to look back and see that we made the right decisions to give clients what they want, rather than what we assumed they wanted. I don’t know what the platform will look like in three years. Will it still be a ‘website’, or will it just be a number you call to tell an AI assistant what you need? In any case, I would like JustLawyers to be the go-to solution for young lawyers progressing in their careers and for law firms not just in Belgium, but internationally. The legal industry is changing fast, and I am confident we can help both law firms and lawyers adapt to this new shift.
Michele Pace, CTO, JustLawyers