Nicole Braddick needs no introduction - but if you had to rush one for the purposes of publishing a podcast 👀 you might say she’s the Global Head of Innovation at Factor Law, following the February 2025 acquisition of her company, Theory & Principle, where she served as CEO and Founder. 

A former trial lawyer who transitioned into legal tech 15 years ago, Nicole has been one of the industry's most persistent advocates for bringing modern design and development practices to legal technology. 

Her team has worked with leading law firms, legal tech companies, corporate legal departments, non-profits and public sector organisations to build custom solutions focused on user experience - transforming an industry that, when she started, was "purely functional" and "engineering-led" into one where good design is finally recognised as essential.

We get into all of that and more during our discussion, and lean in hard for Nicole’s system wide view and perspective on what’s happening at present.. 

Key Takeaways

• Nicole advocates that the calculation around build versus buy has fundamentally changed with generative AI. She argues that corporate legal departments should consider getting enterprise accounts with providers like Anthropic or OpenAI and should be building their muscles for developing internal customised solutions rather than defaulting to SaaS products.

• The proliferation of chatbots in law was appropriate when everyone was experimenting with generative AI, but Nicole believes the industry has overcorrected. Chat interfaces place enormous cognitive load on users who must craft effective prompts, whereas traditional point-and-click UIs make things easier by guiding users through structured workflows. Nicole sees the future as lying in hybrid experiences.

• While the AI industry races toward autonomous agents, Nicole sounds a cautionary note for legal applications. The entire value proposition of agents is "getting rid of control"- but lawyers have to wrestle with their ethical obligations and duties to control, to check, and to approve. Nicole sees this as a fascinating design challenge: where previous UX best practices focused on removing friction to create seamless experiences, Nicole and her team are actively considering where they must now strategically add friction and interruption points, believing the goal is to prevent lawyers from blindly clicking "yes, yes, yes" while avoiding so much friction that they abandon the tool.

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