Dr Jackie
Nagtegaal

I came to the law because I loved language, and stayed because I grew interested in how the law uses it to build the worlds we live inside. Contracts, regulation, and the long architecture of convention: these are the structures through which businesses become possible, or impossible, and most of what I have done has sat somewhere along that line.

For two decades I ran a legal service company. I scaled it, and more usefully, I learned what makes legal work feel like a service to the people receiving it rather than a process they survive.

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Then I founded Lawyerly, a commercial legal company for growing businesses in England and Wales, built around the things I would have wanted on the other side of the desk.

Alongside it, I run a legaltech company building smart systems to make the law easier to live with.

My PhD in futures studies threads together all my work. The question that shaped it is the one I keep returning to: not what the law currently is, but what it makes possible, and for whom.

Law and regulation are not background scenery for a person, business, or the world. They are the working architecture: the structures that decide what a person, company, or the world is allowed to become, and what it might become next.