Alice Stephenson on breaking down barriers

Alice Stephenson is a founder and tech lawyer driving inclusion and innovation in law and promoting individuality within the legal profession.

Alice founded Stephenson Law in 2017 to create a law firm that does things differently. Tackling each stereotype head-on, she is on a mission to build a forward-thinking, innovative law firm that puts people at the heart of everything it does. 

Alice's goal is to inspire young women to challenge the perceived barriers to success and see that anything is possible.

In this episode we discuss:

07:23 - Problem-solving
11:00 - Self-reflection and being comfortable with mistakes
13:57 - Client experience
18:27 - Measuring lawyer value outside of billable targets
22:44 - Breaking down barriers

Full Transcript on FringeLegal.com

Alice Stephenson - Breaking down barriers

Ab: [00:00:00] Hello everyone. And welcome to the Fringe Legal podcast. I am thrilled to have Alice Stephenson as my guest today. Alice is the founder and a tech lawyer driving inclusion and innovation in law and promoting individuality within the legal profession. Alice founded Stevenson law in 2017 to create a law firm that does things differently.

Alice's goal is to inspire young women, to challenge the perceived barriers, to succeed and see that anything's possible. We'll dig into much of that today, but before we get started, I thought it'd be helpful to give a little bit of a background of Alice's story if you haven't come across it already. 

So Alice is probably not the person you would imagine when you think of a lawyer and a law firm owner.

She had her first child at 18, and despite conventional wisdom qualified as a lawyer nine months after having her second child and the theme of nine months continues, because nine months after having her third child, she founded Stevenson Law and the firm is doing wonderfully. They won,  Botique Law Firm of the Year 2020 .

And yeah, I'm really thrilled to have Alice on the show because I came across her on LinkedIn through one of her posts where she talks about all of the different barriers. She had to break down to enter the legal profession. And I know plenty of people for whom that actually becomes a hurdle.

They haven't been able to overcome for many reasons. So I thought it was important to have a discussion around that. Alice, thank you so much for coming on the show. 

Alice Stephenson: [00:02:27] Hi, thank you for having me. 

Ab: [00:02:29] Yeah. And I know you're based on the other side of the world. You have a very English accent, but you're in Amsterdam.

So hopefully the canals and the cycling and everything else is treating you nicely. 

Alice Stephenson: [00:02:39] Yes. Yes. Thank you. 

Ab: [00:02:42] So there's really three things I wanted to try and cover today. We'll start with something that relates to your story. You talk a lot about breaking down barriers. And as I mentioned in the prelude, that's how I came across you.

You've been, let's call it outspoken on LinkedIn and rightly so around how to make the profession less gray and more individual and helping people to bring about their personality. We talked about tattoos and you've talked about tattoos in the past and I have a whole back full of tattoos so I certainly admire that.

And you've talked about how being a woman or having kids at an early stage, and basically how all the challenges you had to overcome to get to where you are. Talk to me where you are today with that and how that shaped your journey into the legal profession. 

Tackling challenges [00:03:29] Alice Stephenson: [00:03:29] Sure. I think we all have so many challenges and obstacles that we come up against whatever path we choose.

But I guess we all have slightly different ways of dealing with them and approaching them. I think they're my biggest obstacle has always been having a child at such a young age.  I was only 18 when I had Lydia. And that was obviously a massive obstacle to starting a career, to getting to getting my first degree.

Obviously, having her has been one of the most wonderful things in my life, but there's no doubt that it's certainly made some things a lot harder particularly cause I didn't have a lot of support at the time. So I think I launched into adulthood with a pretty big problem that I needed to deal with like how was I going to support myself and support my child and make something of myself . And I had to get on with it really. I just, I tackled it a bit, like just a problem.  If I want to get a job, that's gonna pay me a decent salary, then, convention dictates that the best way of doing that is to get a degree, to get education.

So I was followed a process really, and figured out the best way that I was going to be able to do it, which university I went to, which course I went to, how I was going to pay for that, all of the different parts of the puzzle, and then fitted them all together. And I've applied that logic to all of the problems that I've encountered ever since then.

So when I applied to getting a training contract I had a problem because I didn't get very good A-levels because when I take my A-levels, I was seven months pregnant and obviously lots of law firms still take A-levels into account. That made things a lot harder and I had to find this way around that.

And then starting my own firm. So many people told me that I wasn't going to be able to do it. They were going to be, there were so many reasons insurance was going to be too expensive or I wasn't even going to be able to get insurance. I wasn't going to be able to get authorization from the SRA.

I wasn't going to be able to find any clients. I wasn't going to have to find anyone to work for me. I wasn't gonna be able to make any money, honestly the list was endless and I could have quite easily have just thought, Oh, do you know what this sounds like far too much effort required -  I'm not going to bother. 

But I think it, that's not really the way that my brain works. I look at each part of it as an individual problem and try and solve that problem and break it down into small chunks. And what happens is when you do that, actually it does so fall into place and you move along one small step at a time. But when you look back, you actually realize how much you've achieved just by doing it like that.

Ab: [00:06:26] There's so many things that you're saying, some of which I can definitely relate to because just getting into law school, getting into university. It's a challenge and you have to keep going.  Sometimes you do have to problem solve. 

And the law firm point is so interesting because I know so many  tech company founders, and generally the message that they get, across the board, is not that, Oh, don't do it right? It's almost a Silicon Valley culture of you should do it, just jump in it's okay. It will be difficult, no one argues that it's going to be difficult, but you can figure it out. But for law and FinTech and a lot of these kinds of quite heavily regulated professions it's almost as a hindrance for new entrance. And then we have this conversation, Oh, the profession is not changing things. Aren't changing. They're the same. And there is a very real link to you keep dis...