The Global Perspective: How International Experience Shapes Legal Innovation
Where I spotlight Nikki Shaver's global perspective and unique background and how she has transformed how legal professionals discover and implement technology
This article is the second in a series that I am calling, “Profiles in Innovation,” where I explore innovators’ stories. This second profile is of Nikki Shaver. I hope you like it.
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When Nikki Shaver was a child growing up across Europe, she would bump into lampposts on her way to school because she refused to put down her book while walking. There are pictures of her halfway up a tree in the heart of Africa, completely absorbed in reading, and she used to prop books behind the bathroom faucet while brushing her teeth. "It really was my thing," she recalls with a laugh.
This voracious reader who dreamed of becoming a literary fiction author would seem an unlikely candidate to revolutionize legal technology. Yet today, as CEO and co-founder of LegalTech Hub, Shaver has created the most comprehensive global directory of legal technology solutions in the world, helping law firms and corporate legal departments discover and use tools that are transforming the practice of law.
Her journey from literature scholar to legal tech pioneer illustrates something profound about innovation in our interconnected world: the greatest breakthroughs often come from those who refuse to be confined by traditional boundaries, whether they're geographical, professional, or intellectual.
The Wanderer's Education
Shaver's unconventional path began with an unconventional childhood. Born in the Netherlands to an Australian mother and Canadian father, she spent her formative years moving between countries as her astrophysicist father worked for European scientific organizations. "This is actually the 9th city I'm living in in the 7th country," she explains. "I think that gives me a slightly unusual perspective on it."
This constant movement could have been destabilizing, but for Shaver, it became a masterclass in adaptation and empathy. "I think moving country to country teaches you about adapting to different cultures. But it also teaches you about how different people perceive things," she reflects. "And I think that's really important when it comes to things like adoption of legal technology."
The practical implications of this global upbringing became clear early on. Both of her parents faced the same bureaucratic challenges that would later shape Shaver's professional life. Her mother, a doctor who studied medicine in Australia and did her residency in London, ended up working for the Americans on a U.S. military base in Germany because of licensing restrictions and language barriers. Her father's scientific career required constant navigation of different institutional systems and cultural expectations.
"History kind of repeating itself with the licenses," Shaver notes, referencing her own later struggles with legal licensing requirements when moving between countries. But these early experiences with professional mobility taught her something valuable: the arbitrary nature of many barriers and the universal human capacity for adaptation.
The Literature Detour
Despite growing up in a household dominated by hard sciences, Shaver's intellectual passion lay elsewhere. "I honestly, as long as I can remember from even elementary school, I really love to read," she says. Her undergraduate work focused on English literature, history, and psychology, followed by a master's degree in literature with a specialization in post-colonial studies.
This academic focus was hardly accidental. Post-colonial literature is fundamentally about "talking back to center and understanding the repressive regimes of imperialism." For someone who had experienced firsthand how artificial boundaries—whether national, cultural, or professional—could limit human potential, this field of study offered a framework for understanding power structures and resistance.
But academic life began to feel constraining in its own way. "There was this notion that somehow, by studying it and writing about it critically, we were doing some good for the world," Shaver explains about her graduate studies. "There was this kind of notion that there would be a trickle down effect from the university, and that it would have some impact, and I just became skeptical of that."
The disconnect between academic analysis and real-world impact was troubling. Even more personally, she found that intensive literary analysis was interfering with her love of reading itself. "I kind of missed being able to read books for joy rather than reading them in order to break them apart line by line."
Standing at a crossroads between pursuing a PhD, entering business, or studying law, Shaver chose law school. The decision represented a natural evolution from her post-colonial specialization. "You can see that out of post-colonialism and that kind of wanting to help people, it kind of became a natural extension."
Finding Her Legal Voice
Law school in Sydney proved to be a revelation. "I immediately from day one was just absolutely loved it," she recalls. "The logic of making those arguments." The analytical skills she had developed in literature translated perfectly to legal reasoning. "Anyone who's probably done academic critical work in literature or history will understand. But it's quite similar. You have to build out an argument over the course of a paper in academics, and the way to do that, it really is very logical and analytical."
Shaver specialized in defamation law, a field that combined her interests in media, human rights, and close textual analysis. Working first for a judge who convened the defamation list, then at top-tier Australian firms, and eventually in-house at major media companies, she found herself at the intersection of law, technology, and communication.
But even in this seemingly perfect professional fit, she encountered the same types of arbitrary barriers that had shaped her childhood. The highly jurisdictional nature of law meant that her expertise was geographically bounded in ways that felt increasingly artificial. When her family decided to move to Canada, she faced the prospect of complete requalification—taking multiple exams over at least a year just to practice law in a different country.
"For me, law was confining because it's so jurisdictionally bound," she explains. "So you study law, you become licensed, and then you can practice in that one jurisdiction and any additional jurisdiction you seek to add, you need to become licensed in that jurisdiction as well."
The Accidental Technologist
The move to Canada forced an unexpected career pivot that would prove transformative. While completing her requalification requirements, Shaver took a contract position in a knowledge management and innovation department at a Canadian law firm. It was, she admits, born of necessity rather than ambition.
But something remarkable happened in that role. "What did happen really quickly is what I realized that I don't have to work at being someone other than who I am," she reflects. "There was just a very natural oh, I can succeed in this just by being the person that I am. It was the first time that I realized I'd probably been putting some effort into playing against type. And now I didn't have to do that anymore."
The work combined technical complexity with human psychology in ways that felt natural to someone with her background. She found herself working with enterprise search systems, building document automation tools using conditional logic, and most importantly, serving as a translator between the legal and technical worlds.
"A lot of what you do is, when you understand the technical language more, being able to explain that to lawyers in a way that makes them understand it, but also explaining legal concepts to IT technicians in a way that allows for things to be built out in certain ways," she explains.
Perhaps most surprisingly, she discovered an aptitude for technology that she never knew existed. "I never would have guessed in a million years that I had an aptitude for technology that just did it would never have, even in the faintest recesses of my brain, occurred to me."
Looking back, she recognizes missed opportunities. "I think coding is actually linguistic," she observes. "Had I understood that earlier, I think I might have been quite interested, because the way my brain works is very logical. So that kind of linguistics plus logic, I think, would have appealed to me greatly, but I wouldn't have known that at the time, because we had zero exposure to it."
Building Bridges
The knowledge management role revealed something profound about the nature of innovation: the most valuable contributions often come from those who can bridge different worlds. Shaver's international background, literary training, legal expertise, and newly discovered technical aptitude created a unique combination that was perfectly suited to the challenges of legal technology adoption.
The Toronto knowledge management and innovation community proved to be extraordinarily close-knit, and many of the relationships she formed there remain central to her professional life today. "These people are still very close friends of mine," she says, noting that her former boss, Carla Swansberg, now runs the legal tech company Cleary X, while Simon Wormwell serves as chief strategy officer at the major Canadian firm Osler.
This community taught her something important about professional development: real innovation happens through relationships and sustained collaboration rather than individual heroics. The work itself was deeply technical, involving everything from tweaking relevancy algorithms in enterprise search systems to building conditional logic for document automation, but the human element was equally crucial.
"One of the things that I love about the legal tech and innovation world is, you're still very much within that legal world which I enjoy. But it's international," Shaver explains. "You actually can do this work anywhere in the world."
The Birth of Legal Tech Hub
The idea for Legal Tech Hub emerged from a moment of professional frustration that will be familiar to anyone who has tried to research specialized technology solutions. While working as managing director for innovation and knowledge at Paul Hastings, Shaver regularly needed to find specific legal technology tools, but discovered there was no efficient way to do comprehensive market research.
"I didn't want to go to Google and just search for document automation," she recalls. "I needed a document automation of a particular type that was geared specifically to lawyers, with this type of interface that operated in these languages for these types of lawyers in these practice groups, and there was absolutely no way of searching for that, filtering for it, finding it."
The problem was even more acute for international firms. She met a Lithuanian firm that served clients in five different languages, and for them, "going to Google was completely unhelpful. None of the vendor websites actually stated in which languages their solutions operated."
What started as a personal pain point became a global business opportunity. Working with her husband Chris Ford, Shaver launched LegalTech Hub in October 2020 as "a global directory of legal technology solutions." The mission was explicitly international from the beginning: "to democratize legal technology" by making it accessible to legal professionals anywhere in the world.
The platform was designed to function like an enterprise search system for legal technology, with sophisticated filtering capabilities based on a custom taxonomy of 74 legal tech categories. Users could search not just by general function, but by specific attributes like supported languages, deployment models, practice area focus, and target firm size.
Scaling Global Impact
The directory was just the beginning. In 2022, Jeroen Plink, former CEO of Practical Law in the U.S. and founder of multiple legal technology companies, joined as co-founder and COO. His vendor-side experience complemented Shaver's buyer-side perspective, allowing them to expand into comprehensive market intelligence.
Today, LegalTech Hub maintains detailed information on over 2,000 legal technology products globally and has evolved into a full-service platform offering market reports, strategic analysis, advisory services, and educational content. The company advises everyone from early-stage startups to mature legal tech companies to private equity firms making investments in the space.
But the educational mission remains central. "We publish everyday articles about the industry and what different events in the market mean for people and for lawyers, so that lawyers themselves can get up to speed on legal tech and the technology that's really impacting their practice at large."
The timing has proven fortuitous. Legal technology is experiencing unprecedented growth and mainstream attention, driven largely by the emergence of generative artificial intelligence. When LegalTech Hub began collecting data for their generative AI market map in July 2023, they identified 151 products. By the time they published the map, that number had grown to 400. "I think in a year from now we'll see a thousand," Shaver predicts. "That's my genuine guess."
Witnessing the AI Revolution
The scale of investment flowing into legal technology startups has been equally dramatic. "Of the biggest raises in legal tech since ChatGPT launched, something like 5 of them have already happened this year," Shaver notes. More significantly, the types of investors getting involved have changed completely. "If you look at the investors that are active in the industry now, it's very big name Silicon Valley investors who just a few years ago would not have touched legal tech."
This mainstream recognition extends beyond investment circles. Harvey, one of the leading legal AI companies, was recently recognized as one of Fortune's 50 top AI companies alongside Microsoft, Meta, Anthropic, and OpenAI. "That's never happened in legal tech before," Shaver observes. "It's a very unusual, exciting period, I think, in our industry."
But she maintains a balanced perspective on the current boom. While acknowledging that some of the investment levels may not be sustainable and that some companies will "crash and burn," she sees the fundamental transformation as irreversible. The question is not whether AI will reshape legal practice, but how quickly and in what ways.
Currently, most AI applications in legal technology focus on incremental productivity improvements—what she calls "faster horse" solutions rather than truly transformative innovations. "The trouble is, it requires imagination and intent to work in really completely new ways," she explains.
The more interesting developments are addressing problems that were previously impossible to solve with technology. She cites the example of the "circle up" process in securities law, where associates traditionally had to manually review prospectus documents page by page to identify numbers requiring auditor verification, because some figures were written numerically while others were spelled out alphabetically. "That kind of verifies all that and says it all checks out. Basically, it's usually an associate's job to go through the prospectus and literally by hand circle any of the numbers that require auditing in that way." AI can now automate this entirely.
The Empathy Advantage Revisited
Throughout this technological transformation, Shaver's early lessons in cultural adaptation have proven increasingly valuable. Her ability to understand how different organizational cultures approach change has been crucial in helping legal professionals adopt new technologies.
"I do think that having that perspective can be quite helpful at the moment," she reflects, referring to her international background. The empathy developed through constant cultural adaptation allows her to see past surface-level resistance to understand the deeper concerns driving reluctance to embrace new tools.
She's also discovered that this kind of cultural fluency can be developed intentionally. During her early days in New York, she practiced what she called "green light walks"—leaving her office with no particular destination and simply following whichever traffic lights were green. "That's how I explored New York was just by walking and allowing that to dictate where I went, and it meant I saw completely new things."
This practice of deliberately seeking new perspectives extends beyond physical exploration. "Find new ways of experiencing the everyday things in your life," she suggests. "Get a different perspective on the room in which you work. Stand up on a chair and look at it from that perspective. When you're on your way to work, instead of getting off at the same stop every single time, get off a stop early or a stop late and walk back and open your mind in that way."
The key insight is that empathy—like any skill—can be strengthened through conscious practice. "I do think you can learn it. But I also think if you are trying to learn it, you really have to bring a consciousness to that effort. It's not just accidental that you really have to think, I am going to stretch that muscle of being able to empathize with other people and step into other people's shoes."
The Purpose-Driven Professional
What drives someone to build a global platform while simultaneously teaching law school, writing for industry publications, speaking at international conferences, and advising companies across multiple continents? For Shaver, the answer is simple: purpose.
"I really am very purpose driven. And that's always been the thing that I seek from work more so than financial gain," she explains. "Being part of the legal tech community makes me feel as though I'm part of making law better for everyone."
This sense of purpose extends beyond the commercial applications of legal technology to its potential for addressing broader social challenges. "Something that I want to do more of in the future is work with solutions that really help with the access to justice problem. Because I think that's where generative AI and law has the potential to really transform in the most positive way that we could imagine."
The focus on meaningful impact over financial reward reflects a broader philosophy about professional success. Rather than optimizing for traditional metrics, Shaver has built a career around solving problems she finds genuinely important and working with people she respects and enjoys.
This approach has also influenced how she thinks about leadership and role modeling. "I will say, providing a positive view to my children of what work can be. I think they see how lit up I am by what I do, how much I love it, how much I enjoy the people in my life because of work."
Her daughter finds it "cool that her mom is able to do this kind of thing," and Shaver values "being able to give her that feeling that she can do anything." The example of purposeful professional engagement becomes a form of generational investment in expanding possibilities.
The Innovation Imperative
Looking ahead, Shaver sees the current moment as just the beginning of a much larger transformation in how legal services are delivered and consumed. The most significant changes won't come from making existing processes more efficient, but from reimagining the fundamental relationships between legal professionals and their clients.
"I think the areas where we're going to see much more actual transformative tech is in the nexus between law firms and their clients," she predicts. "We're starting to see tools that are building out to actually transform the way legal services are delivered that sit between the two that bring productivity to both, but also then change the way that they interact and the way that they work in a really profound way."
This transformation will require exactly the kind of boundary-crossing thinking that has characterized Shaver's career. Traditional categories—lawyer versus technologist, domestic versus international practice, efficiency versus innovation—are proving inadequate for the challenges ahead.
The legal professionals who thrive in this environment will be those who can adapt quickly, think across disciplines, and maintain genuine curiosity about new possibilities. They will need the cultural fluency to work with diverse teams, the technical literacy to engage meaningfully with emerging tools, and the empathy to understand how change affects different stakeholders.
Most importantly, they will need to maintain a sense of purpose about why these changes matter. Technology alone cannot solve the fundamental challenges facing the legal profession, but thoughtfully applied innovation can make legal services more accessible, more effective, and more responsive to human needs.
The Continuing Journey
When asked about work-life balance, Shaver offers characteristically honest self-reflection: "I don't think I have balance in my life right now in that respect. I really don't. I wish that I had better balance at the moment."
Her solution involves returning to the practices that shaped her international childhood: getting outside, taking walks, breathing fresh air, and most importantly, traveling to new places that force different perspectives. "Being able to take a morning and walk around Tallinn and see the city and the history there that takes you outside of yourself, and that to me is the way that I really am able to kind of let go."
Travel also stimulates creativity in ways that busy routines cannot. "It's also when I have my most creative ideas, because I think people forget that when we are so busy that it kind of deadens creativity. And you need creativity, I think, to do this kind of problem solving work well."
This insight captures something essential about innovation in any field: breakthrough thinking requires space, perspective, and the willingness to step outside familiar patterns. The same qualities that made a literature-focused teenager into a legal technology pioneer continue to drive her work today.
The rebellion that took her from post-colonial literary criticism to legal practice to technology innovation was never about rejecting her past, but about refusing to be limited by artificial boundaries. Each transition built on previous experience while opening new possibilities.
Today, as artificial intelligence reshapes legal practice and global connectivity makes international collaboration routine, Shaver's unconventional background seems less like an anomaly and more like a preview of the kind of professional agility that all knowledge workers will need.
The future belongs to those who can translate between different worlds, who can see familiar problems from fresh angles, and who maintain the curiosity to keep learning regardless of their accumulated expertise. In other words, it belongs to people who think like permanent expatriates, always ready to adapt and always eager to discover what lies just beyond the next green light.
The girl who bumped into lampposts because she couldn't stop reading has become a guide for others trying to see where the legal profession is heading. Her story suggests that the most valuable professionals of tomorrow will be those who maintain beginner's mind while building deep expertise, who stay curious about other cultures and other ways of thinking, and who never stop asking whether there might be a better way to solve old problems.
In a profession built on precedent and tradition, this kind of thinking isn't just useful, it's revolutionary.
This article is the second in a series of Profiles in Innovation, where I spotlight the stories and achievements of innovators and how they think differently.
Nikki Shaver is the CEO and Co-founder of LegalTech Hub. To learn more or support their work, visit legaltechnologyhub.com.
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