Jackie
Nagtegaal

I came to the law because I loved language, and stayed because I became interested in how the law uses it to build the worlds we live inside.

That interest became a PhD in futures studies, and the question at its centre 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. They are the working architecture that decides what a person, a business or a society is allowed to become.

My day-to-day work is the practical side of that question: access to justice, and new economic models for legal services. For two decades I have built legal services in South Africa that have given a million people a different pathway to the law. At Lawyerly, I work with small and medium-sized businesses, the core of any economy, so that the law becomes something they build with rather than something that happens to them.