This week, Adrian is joined by Juliet Schalker, litigation partner at Debenham Ottaway in St Albans. After nearly a decade in the City, Juliet made the bold decision to move to a regional firm, not as a career retreat, but a values-driven recalibration. What followed was a journey to redefine success, build a collegiate team culture and prove that first-class litigation work doesn't require a London postcode.

This conversation follows Juliet’s professional and personal evolution and explores some big career and culture themes along the way:

• How growing up in South Africa and being the first in her family to go to university shaped Juliet's perspective on work, confidence and purpose;
• Why she left a thriving City career for a more balanced role and how she has reclaimed time, team spirit and quality work without sacrificing ambition;
• The reality of making partner, leading a team and building culture, and why Juliet now puts emotional intelligence and curiosity above exam results;
• Her candid thoughts on why the traditional law firm model needs modernising: from presenteeism and burnout, to the scarcity of training contracts; and
• Why Juliet believes regional firms are more than a “lifestyle” move: they are a strategic career choice that better reflects where law is going, not where it’s been.

💬 Stay tuned to hear Juliet reflect on her proudest case: a £20m Commercial Court win that protected an innocent family’s livelihood and why helping people, not chasing prestige, has become her greatest marker of success.

This week, Adrian is joined by the brilliantly energetic and passionate Richard Port MBE, family solicitor specialising in domestic abuse and past president of Birmingham Law Society. Known for taking on the toughest cases and never backing down from a fight for justice, Richard shares a career built on purpose, persistence and a refusal to let victims go unheard.

This conversation dives into Richard’s journey and explores some urgent and compelling themes along the way:

• How an early taste of legal work at 14 led to a lifelong calling in family law and domestic abuse advocacy, even though he never planned to specialise there;
• Why too many victims are still given poor advice and how Richard empowers them to take back control, even after being failed by other lawyers;
• What really happens in family court: from legal U-turns and recorded confessions to Mafia-style wire taps and the lawyer tricks most people never see;
• Why he believes lawyers have a duty to raise the standard and how receiving an MBE for what he sees as working the benchmark, left him more determined, not satisfied; and
• How he used his year as Birmingham Law Society President to turn the spotlight on others, championing underrepresented voices and grassroots talent across the profession.

This one includes court drama, gold Converse and a near-fatal police station prank. No wonder Richard’s known as the “Jeremy Kyle of lawyers” to his peers.

This week, Adrian is joined by the insightful and irrepressibly forward-thinking Electra Japonas, founder of TLB, creator of the OneNDA initiative and now Chief Legal Officer at Law Insider. Electra shares her journey from aerospace contracts to legal entrepreneurship, revealing how she carved out a new kind of legal career by trusting her instincts and refusing to settle for outdated ways of working.

This conversation dives into Electra’s cross-border, cross-discipline legal career and explores some bold and exciting ideas shaping the future of law:

• How Electra's early years in the European Space Agency and Airbus exposed her to process design, supplier complexity, and the (often painful) interface between law and innovation;
• Why she stepped away from traditional practice to found The Law Boutique (TLB) and what she learned from bootstrapping a legal ops consultancy with no funding and two pregnancies;
• The origin of OneNDA, how a single viral LinkedIn post turned into a global standard and why its eventual acquisition by Law Insider gave her “relief, not euphoria”;
• Why Electra believes AI is already reshaping the legal profession and that “prompt engineering is the new drafting”, meaning lawyers must systematize their judgment, not just repeat it; and
• How legal professionals can future-proof themselves by becoming architects, not executors, of knowledge, and why curiosity, collaboration and codified instinct are the new superpowers.

💬 Note: This episode is overflowing with optimism, tech reality checks and one clear message: the future of law isn’t coming, it’s already here.