“I realised quickly that many people who need legal help were not getting it and I was passionate to bring more access to legal services"

Claudia is an ex lawyer, founder of online law firm Legal Beagle and founder of chat bot tech firm automio. She is fiercely committed to making quality legal help available to everyone, everywhere. Not capable of accepting the “this is the way we’ve always done it” attitude, Claudia is the Lady-Gaga of New Zealand's legal sector, challenging the norm and bringing fresh ideas to add efficiency and flair to a traditional profession.

​

Claudia talks to Ed Andrew about her journey into law and out of it to founding a law practice with her father, and building her own technology software platform to host automio.  She shares her passion for being at the forefront of change in the legal profession, hiring freelancers and those working around the world and waking at 4am to juggle her role as a mother and hectic start up founder.  We talk extensively about ideation, entrepreneurship and how chat bots can be built to help many diverse applications outside of law as well.

​

• The beginning of her journey into tech innovation, facebook groups and access to legal services(2.30)

 

• Founding Legal Beagle with her father and where her inspiration for technology came from (6.20)

 

• On selling her law firm and being unhappy as a lawyer (8.10)

 

• Discussing today's opportunities around the profession not just lawyers (11.40)

 

• on autom.io and how it works for law firms and lawyers, how lawyers are very particular and very diverse as to their requirements (12.40)

 

• On their sweet spot as a business and excitement about access to justice (18.40)

 

• Opportunities are huge for litigation based lawyer bots (21.10)

 

• Creating digital lead magnets for acquisition of clients online, on her passion for the inbound marketing space, can be used for automated processes and also training (23.10)

 

• Building out into fintech and insurance, self service bot platforms, moving into the enterprise space (26.40) 

 

• Using freelancers around the world, distributed teams, using slack to communicate and zoom for video (32.10) 

 

• On being a working mum, her advise for other start up parents, and getting out of the habits of big law firms (38.40)

 

• On setting up Legal beagle in 2011, to sell online legal services like the Legal Zoom of NZ (44)

 

• On founding automio with her father (45.40)

 

• On books, creating a painted vision of her future, meditation and mentoring with coaches such as Dan Martell, Emily Morrow and Rachel Rodgers, and herself mentoring Women in Tech..

 

Suggested reading:

​

​

​

​

 

To contact Claudia and learn more about her please click on the links below

​​