My Journey into Tech Law

This year marks 15 years since I started practicing law and it finally feels like I made the right choice. Far too long the legal profession has been seen as conservative and traditional but now tech is transforming law and I want to chronicle the change not just a spectator but someone who is championing this change. At my core, I would like to think of myself as a logical person who places the ethos of logic and truth as the supreme moral value. In my younger days this penchant towards rationality drew me into the sciences and I spent my youth dabbling in math, physics and biology before I was seduced by the beauty of dialectics and argumentation. Law to me came as the promised messiah of logic with the potential to usher in great changes for the world.

I became a Barrister and pursued my LLM in which I wrote a thesis on the impact and legal treatment of ‘immoral legislations’ particularly in the context of Pakistan. Whilst written only as a work of intellectual gymnastics, my thesis was picked up by the Supreme Court of Pakistan in their biggest case to date, the NRO case. The full 17-member bench of Supreme Court judges endorsed the conclusions I had reached in my thesis and even reproduced entire portions of the thesis in their seminal judgment. At the time of the judgement I was working as a Corporate Associate for a Magic Circle Law Firm in London, which I left to pursue a legal career in Pakistan in hopes for creating a big impact.

Back then, I felt that anything was possible but reality came swinging soon and hit me hard.

The next few years made me realize that the NRO case success for me was merely a case of beginner's luck. When I started practicing in Pakistan and taking up ‘routine matters’ I realized how useless and deceitful the legal profession could be. Most lawyers were simply unneeded ‘middle men’ engaged as paper-pushers to delay disputes. Some lawyers were even working hard to ensure that their clients remain bogged down in complex legal issues that would justify their existence. This system of exploitation was aided by the courts which are inefficient and corrupt.

These shocking revelations of how the Pakistani legal system actively encourages a system of incompetence, bribes and influence disturbed me but did not dissuade me from practicing. I owe this tenacity to a mentor who kept on pressing the value of legal ethics and encouraged me to stand my ground. I spent almost a decade groaning, lumbering and growing slowly whilst also bagging two more ‘groundbreaking cases’.

One was the privatization of PIA wherein I was engaged by all the association of PIA and therefore represented around 300,000 people for Pakistan’s biggest aviation case which we won. The other case was the Panama Leaks Case, which a client filed on my recommendation and it went on to become a national issue that led to the ouster of a former Prime Minister. Throughout this time my legal services were engaged by most of the biggest state institutions, politicians and business groups.

In many cases, I never even got paid and I trust the reader will know why.

The lack of professionalism and constant corruption in Pakistan is crippling and would have thrown me deep into the gutters of apathy had it not been for a silver lining. I was getting recognition all across Pakistan’s universities from professors, faculty and students and I was getting approached by Pakistani scientists, inventors, writers and tech startups who appreciated knowledge, creativity and honesty. Many of my clients were geniuses who had started achieving great things abroad and they began to connect me to companies they worked with.

It’s still a matter of great privilege for me to be giving legal advice to the brightest minds in our country and abroad. More so, even though the Government of Pakistan had no use for the likes of me, the Government of China selected our firm as the official lawyers for their Embassy in Pakistan.

The values of rationality and logic that I thought I would find in courts, I instead began to find in universities, labs and co-working spaces. Two decades ago, I had gone into Law thinking that legislation would change the world, but instead it was code that had changed the world. Learning from these changes I began to shape my firm accordingly. We started by using smart project management tools and we progressed on to technology assisted review, machine learning and AI in our legal practice and have become the most tech forward law firm in Pakistan.

Today I can proudly say that the world’s biggest tech companies when looking at Pakistan’s law seek out our firm to provide answers.

However, our goal is not to have these tools for our enhanced productivity and client relief, these are side benefits. Our goal is to affect a change in Pakistan’s legal systems so that judges who take decades to decide a matter can do so in minutes with AI. We want to put records on blockchain so generational feuds and corrupt officials can be weeded out. We will bring that all important OS update to the legal system so that the ordinary man can see the beauty in law that was stolen from it and justice can not only be done but manifestly seen to be done. The second age of reason is upon us and it is time for us to decide if tech will change law, as a point of order.