Emma Jackson

Emma heads up our legal technology and data team, and is based in our Birmingham office. She discusses her journey from joining the firm as an EA to her current role.

Can you tell us about your journey from joining the firm to becoming head of legal technology and data?

I joined Mills & Reeve in 2005 when I was 22, and the first time I ever came to Birmingham was for my first job interview here! I moved 110 miles away from all of my family and friends as I wanted to live in a vibrant city and Birmingham certainly fitted the bill. Following my interview, I joined as an executive assistant (then known as a legal secretary) in the private client team, which I did for a couple of years.

I was then encouraged by my senior secretary to apply to be an IT trainer - I had a technical background from my previous firm and had been fixing the printers and helping everyone around me with their computers since joining. I moved across to IT and worked in a split role as an IT trainer and took on a service desk role working 2 days a week and continued in that role for 10 years. Towards the end of that time, I started doing more and more project work to support the innovation strand of our 2020 strategy and became an innovation champion for the firm. I ended up leading a project to improve the use of our client facing platform, HighQ. From this role, I then moved over to start the client innovation team, as the technology element of our people, process, and technology trio.

During COVID, as you can imagine the growth in this area really ramped up as people realised that being able to collaborate digitally was vital. We've recently rebranded as legal technology to acknowledge the fact that innovation is part of the culture of the firm and everyone’s job, rather than any team or individual. I expanded the team to include data reporting and data quality a couple of years ago and now head up legal tech and data for the firm. We look after data reporting, client facing technologies and the niche techs that are used in different parts of the legal teams.

What do you enjoy most about your role?

I love that every day is different, and I really enjoy the challenges I’m able to get stuck into. I’m also a total geek and love technology, and really enjoy getting to try and use something in a new way to create a benefit. With platforms like HighQ, we’ve managed to deliver a number of use cases over the years from a platform that isn’t necessarily designed for them. It’s a great feeling creating something new and then seeing it actually being adopted and liked, and getting good feedback about it – it gives me a great deal of job satisfaction.

What’s been your career highlight so far?

There are probably two! Volume Control was a platform that I developed and built in HighQ following the winning idea of our 2019 Hackathon - a time-limited collaborative event that brought people together from across the firm to ideate technology solutions for our clients - and that won an award at the Legal Week Innovation Awards 2020 for Client Management Innovation Tool of the year. Volume Control is an end-to-end case management tool that provides full visibility between the client organisation and Mills & Reeve, allowing in-house teams to have transparency of legal matters. It was great for us to get recognition for that.

I also won Female Innovator of the Year 2022 at the Innovation Awards, which was really unexpected but also a really exciting achievement!

How do you think the firm has changed over the years?

In some ways it’s changed a lot and in other ways I don’t think it’s changed at all. Even after the significant growth the firm’s experienced since I joined, it’s maintained the same feeling of care, and it still feels like I’m working with people who are friends as well as colleagues a lot of the time. I could be in the middle of an important meeting, and if one of my children isn’t well, people will tell you to leave and take the time to sort things out and come back when everything’s okay. I think it’s really special that through the firm’s growth, we’ve managed to keep that family-friendly feel and are still such a compassionate, caring, loyal firm which still cares about recruiting people who genuinely embody our core values.

Do you have any advice for people looking to join Mills & Reeve?

Yes - don’t think twice about it! Since joining as an EA in 2005, I’ve had I don’t know how many opportunities to grow and evolve, and I’ve always been supported and encouraged to chase those. It’s a forward-thinking, ambitious firm that’s truly open to embracing the experience and expertise of the people that work here. I didn’t go on to higher education after school but I’ve had so many vocational, on-the-job learning opportunities and subsequently been allowed to take risks that have allowed me to get to where I am today and accomplish some great achievements. I truly don’t think I would’ve had the same opportunities at another firm.

Existing clients