Bio
Isabel trained as a finance lawyer at Freshfields, then moved from fee earning to design and deliver Freshfields’ Legal Solutions Hub in Manchester, Germany and Hong Kong. She then became Freshfields’ Chief Legal Innovation Officer and Head of Knowledge, shaping the firm’s digital transformation strategy and leading the development of client facing digital products. Isabel established the first Freshfields CX Lab in Berlin. During her tenure as Chief Legal Innovation Officer, Freshfields was named the Most Innovative Law Firm in Europe in 2019. Isabel now consults for the legal sector, providing advisory services to law firms, law companies, alternative legal services providers and legal tech start-ups.
Contribution to Legal Tech
Isabel has spent her 24-year long career consistently pushing the boundaries and driving change in the legal profession. She was an early adopter of SaaS legal tech solutions into legal workflows, and has advocated widely over the years for a move to the Cloud, for alternative resourcing and for use of legal technology to drive better client outcomes. Isabel has always been passionate about the importance of the customer experience, and established the Freshfields Berlin Lab to help to foster a customer-focussed approach to digital product development in law. She actively supports the legal tech community, has informally mentored a number of legal tech start-ups, and sits on the board of a legal software and services start-up. She believes in the importance of practical, technology-focussed legal education and is a board member of a new, entirely digital College of Legal Practice. She sits on a number of committees focussed on legal tech adoption, including the City of London Corporation Legal Tech Steering Group and is a mentor for the University of Oxford’s Law and Computer Science Programme. Isabel was listed as one of the top 10 innovative lawyers in the FT Innovative Lawyers Report for 2018.
