Ed Stennett

This week's piece comes from Ed Stennett, Head of Growth at Nomio. We asked him about his path into legal tech, how Nomio helps legal teams and his advice to anyone hoping to build an in-house career in the age of AI.

Q: Thank you for chatting to us, Ed! Could you tell us a little about your career so far and your role at Nomio?

Both my parents were lawyers - litigation and conveyancing respectively in big London firms, eventually moving to smaller ones to be with family (me and my brothers)!

They wouldn't let me go into law, so I've done the next best thing: legal tech.

My background is B2B software marketing, and I was previously head of marketing at another startup. At Nomio, I'm Head of Growth, which is broadly about getting our name out there. The best part of the job this year was interviewing 25 in-house lawyers for our report, Ready or Not?, on how legal teams are really using AI.

P.s. if you’re interested in reading the report, you can download it for free here.

Q: For anyone who's never heard of Nomio, how would you explain what you do in a couple of sentences and what problem were you solving when you built it?

We help small in-house legal teams whose signed contracts are scattered across inboxes, shared drives, and old systems. Nomio is the contract repository you never have to set up or maintain: ask anything about any contract your business has ever signed and get an answer you can fully trust in seconds.

The problem is bigger than most people realise. When we asked in-house lawyers (n=85), only 24% could find every signed contract in one place. That means most legal teams are losing hours digging through folders for answers the business needs immediately.

Q: A lot of our readers are interested in in-house legal careers. Given what you've learned about in-house teams working at Nomio, what advice would you give to them?

Two things came through in almost every interview for the report.

First, judgement. As Andy Figgins, General Counsel at Rezolv Energy, put it: "What do your clients pay for? They pay for your judgement." AI will never take that away.

Second, learn the craft before you lean on the tools. Charlotte Taylor-Evans, Group General Counsel at Quanta Group, told us about a newly qualified lawyer who used AI to mark up an NDA in her first week, without checking it. Charlotte printed the document, handed her a pen and sent her into a meeting room: "Go mark it up, use your brain." If you've never produced the work yourself, you can't spot when the AI gets it wrong.

Q: And finally, looking ahead, what's the single most important thing aspiring legal professionals should understand about AI?

That AI literacy will separate lawyers, not replace them. Oliver Storey, Head of Legal at Metro Bank, said it well: "We will be replaced by people that use AI if we don't get on that bandwagon."

I spoke to Amy Cronin's (Legal Director) team at Skyscanner. They are now building their own agents: a contract bot, a procurement bot, a regulatory horizon scanner. That's the opportunity for the next generation. Learn to build, do the things others can't, and pair that with the judgement AI can't teach. That combination will set you apart in any legal team.

Thanks so much to Ed for taking the time to chat with us. If you’re already working in an in-house team who might benefit from Nomio, or you’re just interested in reading more about what they do, you can view their website and book a free demo here.