From Corporate Law at Cambridge to Legal Tech

I have a background in the sciences, studying Natural Sciences at Jesus College Cambridge 2009-2012 with a particular interest in behavioural neurology and evolutionary psychology. After graduating, I trained to be a lawyer and spent four years working as a solicitor at Freshfields, a magic circle law firm.

Whilst I enjoyed my law career, last year I realised that I still had a technical itch to scratch. I am naturally analytical, and enjoy problem solving, building and creating things. For that reason I decided to quit my job and learn to code with Le Wagon.

I will always be grateful for the amazing privilege I had to study at Cambridge. The University provides a very special environment for learning, and I was inspired to be lectured and tutored by some of the most brilliant minds in my field. As time passes since I graduated, I appreciate that more and more.

I had been interested in learning how to code for quite a while - given my age I think I kind of missed the boat and hadn't really been exposed to coding before. So I was curious about Le Wagon…

My decision to embark on Le Wagon was largely to satisfy my own personal interest in learning how to code. Having said that, my experience from Le Wagon has been really helpful in my new role. It has also opened up a whole range of new career possibilities for me.

I loved the course and would highly recommend it. I was particularly impressed by the very high standard of teaching, and the course materials. The bootcamp was well structured to challenge and stretch all members of the cohort irrespective of background knowledge and ability - I think that's quite a hard thing to do. 

I had already secured my job with Lexoo when I started at Le Wagon, but didn't really know what being a Product Manager would involve. I knew that I wanted a greater understanding of the development process, and to be able to work in an engineering or engineering-adjacent role. What I learnt on the course has definitely broadened my horizons, and often comes in handy in my new role.

I've been working as a Product Manager at Lexoo since January 2019, doing a mixture of strategy, product design, project management and development. Our CTO at Lexoo has been great about letting me get my hands dirty and do some coding, so I do development tasks on our app on a semi-regular basis alongside my PM role. 

It's been really helpful to be able to do that, as it means I have an in-depth understanding of how all our technical assets work which I wouldn't otherwise have. It's also really helpful in my current role to have a good understanding of development processes, as the product and development teams at Lexoo are fully integrated and we work closely on projects all the time.

We are living in a digital age, and it's funny to think that we now walk around with tiny supercomputers in our pockets and we have no idea how they work. Given the extent to which technology now touches all of our lives, I think that having at least a basic understanding of how computer programming works is really important.

I'm currently working through the React course provided by Le Wagon, which I'm enjoying so far. I'm also getting used to vue.js, which we use a lot at Lexoo.

I would absolutely recommend Le Wagon to anyone in my position, particularly those wanting to go into technical careers. Some reflection on your own skills and aspirations can provide some helpful insight as to whether learning to code is for you. I'd also advise trying out some free resources such as codeacademy before embarking on a full bootcamp, to make sure it's actually something that you will enjoy.