Bio
Joanne Anderson is the Chief Product Officer of Clifford Chance Applied Solutions. Jo is responsible for ensuring Clifford Chance develops and maintains products which truly meet client needs. Jo started her career as a lawyer at Mayer Brown International and became a partner there in 2000.
She joined the Practical Law Company in 2005 and established the Product Management function during a time of high growth. Jo worked closely the Technology and Editorial teams and established a culture, processes and systems to bring agility and clarity to product development, putting clients at the center of everything. Jo joined Thomson Reuters following Thomson Reuters’ acquisition of Practical law in 2013, working as the Business Change Lead on a variety of product and platform integration projects. Jo is also a Business Coach, working with senior lawyers.
Contribution to Legal Tech
Joanne took the leap from being a partner at a top international law firm into legal tech back in 2005 on a mission to demystify the practice of law and to be the Steve Jobs for legal tech, making beautiful products that people love to use! She is continuing on that mission at Clifford Chance Applied Solutions creating new products that meet client needs using sophisticated product management techniques and blending these with the firm’s deep legal expertise.
Despite her many years working in Technology teams, she sees her contribution as being on the people-side: being open and curious especially when things go wrong, listening hard to lots of people who know things she doesn’t, telling stories about her experience so others can learn and trusting the team to collaborate to spot solutions (often hiding in plain sight) as is the case with the recent refinements they have made to their award-winning, automated drafting solution, CCDr@ft.
To Joanne, it is important to remember those less fortunate. She is a huge advocate of designing products for those with disabilities (they tend to work better for everyone) and she is very proud that Clifford Chance Applied Solutions has given free access to their new Data Privacy tool to a number of different charities. Clifford Chance have also recently concluded a pilot collaboration with Coca Cola and Thomson Reuters on a series of webinars to develop legal tech solutions for four charities.
