Lance Michalson

After a 30-year career in technology law, most recently in a senior in-house role at a global IT services company, several things attracted me into the world of legal consulting.

First, I had reached a point where I no longer want to manage people – I now want to put my energy into drafting, negotiating and problem-solving, not headcount, performance reviews and administration.

Secondly, I wanted genuine control over the type of work I’m doing. With Peerpoint, I get to choose assignments that play to my strengths and interests, rather than just waiting to see what lands on my desk.

Finally, I didn’t want to step down a level. I knew I wanted to stay close to complex, high calibre work, and the Peerpoint client base made that possible. One of my key criteria was that I wanted to work in a technology-intensive and data-intensive organisation, preferably in a regulated sector, in order to play to my strengths.

I’m currently seven months into my first placement, which is a one-year, full-time contract in the technology procurement team at a global financial services organisation. I’m advising on a number of their major contract renewals, which includes a big component of uplifting certain older contracts to comply with the latest data security and resilience laws.

Last year was the year of AI and I have been around since Web 1.0. At this stage, AI is the biggest innovation I am going to see and I wanted to be involved. The organisation I’m currently at has rolled out legal AI software Harvey to all their lawyers and it is phenomenal to work with. That has been a really interesting learning curve for me and a new way of practising law that I am pretty excited about. I love technology and I have really embraced that.

It has been great to have access to A&O Shearman training, to their library, and to the technology legal team there, who I have lunch with and can bounce things off whenever I need to. I also feel part of the Peerpoint community – one reason that it works well for me is that I know I am not on my own.

There is definitely a genuine mental shift when you move into consulting. You stop thinking long term in the way that you do as an employee. It is very liberating to stop looking for the next promotion or worrying about internal politics.

You become a trusted member of the team you are working with without being on the payroll. But at the same time, you have to get comfortable with only being half in – you are a high-quality resource brought in to work on a project.

It is important to be honest with yourself at the outset about what you actually want out of your working life. For me, a move into consulting has ticked all the boxes and I would not go back to doing anything else.