Dr Jackie Nagtegaal
I came to the law because I loved language first, 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.
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 delightfully simple tools to make the law easier to live with.
My PhD is in futures studies, and it 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.
Contracts and regulation are not background scenery for a business or the world. They are the working architecture: the structures that decide what a company, or the world, is allowed to become, and what it might become next.
Some writing
