EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT
BECOMING A LAWYER ASSOCIATE
Do your students show a big interest during technology classes? Do they phantasy with improving the world by developing new technologies and phone applications? Are they also curious about the work carried out by lawyers? Let us tell you that the perfect career job exists for them, Lawyer Associate specialised in IT law. Lawyer Associates’ work mainly consists of counselling clients who want to develop new technologies or apps and need to understand what they can and cannot do to abide by the existing legal rules. If you are interested in this STEM career profile, let us introduce you to Martina Piantoni, Lawyer Associate.
Meet Martina Piantoni
For this STEM Job Profile, we talked with Martina Piantoni, a Lawyer Associate specialised in IT Law. Currently, she works at Grimaldi Studio Legale, an Italian Law Firm in Brussels that mostly works for the EU Institutions and international projects. She holds a Bachelor’s Law Degree from the Sapienza University of Rome, and was awarded a Double Degree Exchange Programme at Columbia Law School of New York and a Thesis Research Programme in France.
Having been raised in a family belonging to the legal field, Martina was inspired from an early age to follow this same career path. Years after while studying in New York, she followed the steps of one of her teachers who specialised in IT Law.
“What has helped me most in building my current career is studying in different countries and different languages. It allowed me to explore alternative ways of reasoning and problem solving and enhance my flexibility, which is key when your job is straddling two dissimilar fields (IT and law).“
Curious to find out more about this job? Read about the related skills and scroll down to find and download her career sheet!
SKILLS
Find out about the key skills to become a Lawyer Associate.
Research
One of the most important skills of an IT specialist Lawyer Associate is to be updated with the latest technologies to offer the best-tailored solutions to clients. It implies constant research of the field. “I read, study, and write a lot.”
Leadership
A great part of the work a Lawyer Associate specialised in IT carries out is counselling clients. To make them trust you, apart from being professional and excellent, you need to have a leader attitude when presenting solutions and results of our work. In addition, leadership is needed to support your team and “conduct interviews as part of my research process”.
Adaptability
As a Lawyer Associate, you need to adapt to difficult situations, such as “putting together legal and technical worlds, which means working with people with extremely different backgrounds and adapt to them”.
Productivity
The working day of a Lawyer Associate is quite busy, and to put up with all the tasks, productivity is needed. Proper use of time will grant you success in “coping with many different tasks and projects at the same time and keeping myself always updated”.
Writing
A Lawyer Associate specialised in IT has excellent writing skills to manage legal and technical language. Part of their work includes “drafting legal texts that, once discussed and approved by the Parliaments, will end up governing people’s life.”
Translation
Working in an international environment as a Lawyer Associate requires a good knowledge of different languages. It will increase the number of clients as well as it will help you with the research of new technologies developed in foreign countries. “What has helped me most in building my current career is studying in different countries and different languages”.
Curious to
know more?
Advice to take away
“Be curious and creative, explore, push their limits. Don’t worry if you still don’t know what you want to become. Lifestyles and careers are always transforming, think of the increased easiness to travel and automation which are putting forward jobs and ways of living vastly different from those we have known so far. If you don’t see your “perfect job” out there, you might always create it! Also, communication is key, so focus on learning new languages.” – Martina Piantoni
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0: all the materials and content presented on this STEM Job profile have been co-created by STE(A)M IT, in collaboration with DUET, a project funded by the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No.870697.
