This week, Adrian is joined by the insightful and irrepressibly forward-thinking Electra Japonas, founder of TLB, creator of the OneNDA initiative and now Chief Legal Officer at Law Insider. Electra shares her journey from aerospace contracts to legal entrepreneurship, revealing how she carved out a new kind of legal career by trusting her instincts and refusing to settle for outdated ways of working.
This conversation dives into Electra’s cross-border, cross-discipline legal career and explores some bold and exciting ideas shaping the future of law:
- How Electra's early years in the European Space Agency and Airbus exposed her to process design, supplier complexity, and the (often painful) interface between law and innovation;
- Why she stepped away from traditional practice to found The Law Boutique (TLB) and what she learned from bootstrapping a legal ops consultancy with no funding and two pregnancies;
- The origin of OneNDA, how a single viral LinkedIn post turned into a global standard and why its eventual acquisition by Law Insider gave her “relief, not euphoria”;
- Why Electra believes AI is already reshaping the legal profession and that “prompt engineering is the new drafting”, meaning lawyers must systematize their judgment, not just repeat it; and
- How legal professionals can future-proof themselves by becoming architects, not executors, of knowledge, and why curiosity, collaboration and codified instinct are the new superpowers.
💬 Note: This episode is overflowing with optimism, tech reality checks and one clear message: the future of law isn’t coming, it’s already here.
