I’ve always been interested in law, technology and entrepreneurship. So when I met Sam Flynn (Josef COO) through The Legal Forecast Mentoring Program in early 2020, joining Josef as an intern made sense. While I’d completed other internships in corporate, government and professional services, I wanted to experience life at one of Australia’s best known legal tech startups, and see legal tech solve real world problems in a concrete way.

My internship was structured to rotate me through the different parts of the business, such as customer success, product development and marketing, which gave me valuable exposure to areas I wouldn’t usually come across in my studies.

On my first day, I was tasked with completing the first module of the Designer & Builder Program and providing feedback as a user on how to make it better. It was fantastic to experience something new and have my voice heard. It also gave me the opportunity to build a bot, an exercise that helped me better understand Josef’s product and customers.

Within an hour, I’d built a bot!

Although the bot I created was very simple, the ease of its creation taught me the accessibility of legal tech and its potential to solve our issues. (In my case, my bot solved the ever-tricky question of what to eat for dinner.)  

Seeing clients use Josef really brought this idea to life for me. At Josef, I saw legal and non-legal professionals create bots to solve issues, whether administrative or legal. These clients discovered flow-on benefits from using Josef which created unexpected value, such as catalysing design thinking, facilitating data analysis, and time and cost savings. This made me feel optimistic about the legal industry’s ability to leverage technology to deliver better service to clients. 

Throughout my internship, a highlight for me was seeing Josef’s customer-centric philosophy.  This was particularly apparent when I was involved in developing user-testing sessions, where we delved into the thinking processes of customers when using Josef. The ideas from these feedback sessions were taken on board by the team, and seeing these ideas evolve into practical changes to the Josef platform proved this client-centred focus to me. 

On reflection, I feel very fortunate to have experienced the different parts of a legal tech business and understand the connection between the client and the product, which can be a bit of a rare experience! It also gave me some exposure in legal tech – an area I’m interested in and keen to explore further. Since doing the internship at Josef, I’ve pursued an internship working in strategy at a major financial institution, and I’m currently volunteering time at ALTA to support their events and marketing while I complete my studies.

Looking back on my time at Josef, I’d like to thank the whole Josef team, who have been so welcoming and generous with their time. I can’t wait to see what’s next for Josef! For any students interested in legal tech and entrepreneurship, I would definitely recommend applying to Josef’s internship program if you’re looking for exposure in this area and are interested in working with a lovely bunch of people!

Chiquita completed her internship over four weeks in August 2020, and is currently a final-year Law and Commerce student from Monash University.

Read more on why Josef launched its Legaltech Internship, and if this sound like something you’re interested in, please apply here.