I started my career as a corporate M&A lawyer, working in private practice for a number of years before co-founding Brightflag in 2014. Brightflag is a financial management and matter management platform for corporate legal departments, helping legal teams better manage their legal spend and matters.

I spent many years building and scaling the business, including expanding from our Dublin base into the US and Australia, developing a strong customer base and ultimately taking the business through its acquisition by Wolters Kluwer in 2025.

That experience gave me a deep understanding of how corporate legal teams operate and the challenges they face when adopting technology. Legal teams are often under-resourced and under pressure to demonstrate greater value, so technology has to solve a genuine problem, be easy to adopt and deliver a clear benefit to the team and the wider business.

What stood out to me about Summize was the clarity of its vision around contract intelligence and the opportunity to unlock the value contained within contracts.

Having worked as a lawyer and with corporate legal teams, I’ve seen first-hand how much important information sits within contracts, but also how difficult it can be for legal teams to make use of that information. Too often, lawyers are spending their time on manual processes rather than using the knowledge in their contracts to inform decisions and support the wider business.

Summize is addressing that gap in a way that feels very practical. The focus on making contract intelligence useful within the workflows and tools lawyers already use is particularly compelling to me. It’s about making sophisticated technology genuinely usable for legal teams rather than expecting them to completely change how they work.

I’m incredibly honored to have the opportunity to be involved in Summize’s growth. I’ve learned a huge amount from the Brightflag journey, particularly around scaling a market-leading legal tech product, building a strong customer base and staying relentlessly focused on customer outcomes.

Summize is already a long way along that path, so I will be helping the team look around corners and apply some of the lessons  learned as the business scales to the next level.  

There are a lot of new tools and a huge amount of noise across the legal ecosystem at the moment. What I really like about Summize is that the focus remains on building a great product, making customers successful and helping legal teams achieve better outcomes. I also feel strongly about Summize’s focus on community, which was an important part of my time at Brightflag – bringing experienced legal leaders together and giving them a voice in the development of the product can be incredibly valuable. The Summize Power Counsel creates that opportunity and the names involved in the founding cohort are incredibly impressive. .

The combination of customer focus, a strong product and community were central to our DNA at Brightflag, so I’m excited to bring that experience to Summize.

There’s a lot of pressure on General Counsels and legal teams at the moment. Expectations from the wider business are increasing, there is continued pressure on cost and resources, and they’re having to navigate an enormous amount of noise around AI and new technology.

But the opportunity is to get back to what matters most. That starts with freeing up legal leaders to spend less time on manual work and more time being a better business partner to the organization. It also means making faster, better-informed decisions and operating more efficiently. The data sitting in their contracts is one of the most practical places to start – with the right platform to surface it.  

It’s a really exciting stage for Legal, and Summize is the right partner to navigate this next phase of their role.