Soham Jethani is the Managing Partner of Septten Advisors, a specialist advisory firm focused on technology, AI, fintech and digital assets. Based in Dubai, he advises founders, investors and high-growth businesses on regulatory strategy, cross-border transactions and digital asset regulation across jurisdictions including the UAE, UK, EU and Singapore.

1. Your career has taken you from traditional legal practice to advising businesses at the forefront of technology and innovation. Looking back, was there a defining moment that changed the direction of your career?

Like most lawyers who came up in the early 2010s, I was obsessed with arbitration. It was the buzzword at the time. It was what everybody told me was the fun thing to do in law, and what everybody wanted to get into, particularly investment treaty arbitration.

I eventually joined DLA Piper’s disputes department, where I focused specifically on arbitration. But after running several arbitrations and becoming more senior in the process, I began to grow disillusioned and, frankly, quite bored.

When you work primarily in disputes, you are always encountering companies in crisis. You are there when they are fighting, but you rarely see the other side of the process: the deal being conceived and made. More importantly, you are usually there as a specialist rather than the generalist adviser who helps shape the company. You never have the full context of everything that went into a deal and ultimately caused it to go wrong.

What struck me was that so many of the problems emerging during arbitration had been visible from the outset, in how the companies engaged with each other, structured their relationship and conducted themselves. Over time, I realised that being on the advisory side was far more interesting to me than spending my life writing statements of claim, defences and witness statements or interviewing experts.

If I had to identify one defining episode, it would be a very high-value pipeline dispute concerning the construction of an oil platform and involving companies across three continents. I was one of the mid-level lawyers on the case and was assigned a particularly important task: preparing an expert witness statement accompanying an expert report that would become a cornerstone of the arbitration.

I spent a month going back and forth with two experts who specialised in cement mixing and steel. The statement proved integral to the arbitration, so the work undoubtedly mattered. But the experience made me realise something equally important: I did not want to spend the rest of my life interviewing some of the world’s foremost experts in cement.

2. Technology has become central to your career, but what first sparked your curiosity about it? Was there a particular experience, person, or project that changed the way you looked at the law?

There was no particular technology, person or project that initially drew me in. The honest answer is that I was extremely ambitious.

I looked around the traditional legal profession and realised that, until I reached my fifties, very few people would take me seriously as someone who could stand beside a CEO or founder and help make major decisions for a major company. Most senior founders and executives were considerably older, and the legal profession largely operated on the same assumption: meaningful influence came with age and seniority.

When I looked at emerging technology, however, I saw something very different. Many founders, CEOs and senior decision-makers were my age. At the time, I was in my late twenties. These founders did not necessarily enjoy working with lawyers in their fifties and sixties who lacked the skill set to understand the technologies their companies were developing or the ways in which they were trying to transform society.

That gap did not inspire trust. It also created a unique opportunity for somebody young, ambitious and determined to make a name for himself. If I could understand the technology and speak the language of the people building it, I could distinguish myself much earlier than would have been possible in a conventional legal career.

But none of it came naturally or happened overnight. I was still practising disputes, so I spent a considerable amount of my personal time reading, studying regulation and understanding how the market was moving. I went to events, conventions and conferences and met decision-makers whenever I could. I wanted to understand how their markets worked, what their actual needs were and where the existing legal-services industry was failing them.

It took at least a couple of years before I began developing a reputation as a thought leader. The clients followed after that. It was a combination of focused ambition, tremendous hard work and a refusal to give up.

3. Every successful career has a moment of self-doubt. Can you share one decision or setback that ultimately shaped the professional you’ve become today?

A tremendous amount.

Leaving the protective embrace of a major law firm was not a decision I took lightly. There is undeniable comfort in receiving a regular paycheque, particularly after working so hard to climb the corporate ladder. Walking away means trusting that clients are coming to you because your work is good enough, not simply because of the firm’s name above the door. It requires an enormous amount of belief in yourself.

But I knew it was something I had to do. More than that, it was something I had to become. I did not want to look back at my career and spend the rest of my life wondering, “What if?”

For the first few months, there was genuine anxiety about whether I would make money running my own practice. Eventually, that anxiety faded. I am now far more settled and cannot imagine returning to a position in which I take instructions from a board or a global group of lawyers who do not understand what I am doing or who my clients are.

I get to make my own decisions, set my own standards, work at the speed I prefer and build a team around how I believe things should be done. There is freedom and joy in that. There is also a tremendous amount of additional work. Running your own practice is not for the faint-hearted or the disorganised, which, sadly, many lawyers are, but it is extraordinarily rewarding.

I also think young lawyers are fed a lie in law school: that the only way to succeed in practice is to become a partner in a major law firm, and that partnership represents the pinnacle of professional success. You are expected to spend years killing yourself and grinding away, earning peanuts relative to the value you bring into the firm, all so that you can eventually prove yourself to God knows who. Then, if you are fortunate, you get to work on the biggest deals for the biggest clients, as a cog in the machine.

But if you are distinctive, ambitious and determined to make something of yourself in your own name and your own right, being a cog in the machine will always feel unsatisfactory. Remaining within that structure often means giving up some individuality, personality and freedom to do things in the way you believe is better. Large firms are simply too large to be truly malleable or flexible.

Once you leave, you also begin to see through the mythology of partnership. The system is not designed for everyone to become a partner, let alone an equity partner. Even when you make partner, you have merely reached the bottom rung of a completely new corporate ladder. Equity partnership is another conversation altogether, including whether the equity is even worth having, given the number of extraordinarily strong personalities you must manage. Most lawyers have strong personalities, especially the successful rainmakers.

So yes, the decision to go independent was filled with self-doubt. But looking at where I am now, I have no regrets. If I regret anything, it is that it took me as long as it did.

4. If you had to identify one legal trend that every young lawyer should start paying attention to today, what would it be, and why?

It may sound like a stock answer, but the fact that it has become universal does not make it any less true: AI enablement.

Clients now come to us with questions because Claude has given them a particular interpretation of a particular law.

The way we perform work, bill clients and deploy associates has fundamentally changed. A complex mandate that might once have required an entire team of associates can now be handled by two highly AI-enabled associates and an AI-enabled partner who actually understands prompting and knows how to work through an AI system properly.

Yes, there are legitimate questions about privacy and data protection. But the truth is that many lawyers who harp on endlessly about those risks have not read or understood the basic protective modalities available through the enterprise and workspace offerings of the most prominent and powerful large language models.

Every young lawyer should have a clear line of sight on the AI capabilities of the senior lawyer they are shadowing or learning from. If that senior lawyer is anti-AI, or uses it only in the most basic manner and cannot teach others how to work with it, the young lawyer’s professional education will be fundamentally handicapped.

Any senior lawyer who is not actively studying, experimenting with and training themselves to use AI will eventually find that clients and work begin to dry up. AI can dramatically improve speed, precision and efficiency. I am not saying it replaces legal judgment, commercial acumen or experience. Those qualities are what allow you to shape and interrogate AI output properly. But when used well, AI can amplify them and increase a lawyer’s efficiency tenfold or twentyfold.

As for preparing, please do not imagine that completing a course in AI or prompt engineering will solve the problem. I am not saying those courses have no value, but practice teaches you what theory cannot. There is a reason law graduates must spend years in practice before they are trusted to exercise independent judgment on client matters.

Courses, programmes and AI certifications are all fine and dandy. But what matters is interacting with the technology, using it continuously, learning how to obtain the outcomes you want and developing playbooks and workflows that consistently produce excellent work. That is what will shape an excellent practitioner of the future.

AI is only going to improve. If you do not learn how to work with it, you will be left behind.

5. The legal profession often rewards certainty, while technology rewards experimentation. How do you train yourself to advise clients when the law itself is still evolving?

That is a difficult question because it is something I confront almost every day.

Many lawyers are instinctively risk-averse. They can inflate a position into something far more serious than it actually is. Sometimes they genuinely believe they are protecting the client by recommending the most structured and conservative route. At other times, they simply lack sufficient local experience to provide a more nuanced answer. But they still want the fees, so they repeat what is written in the regulation without possessing the local colour or practical knowledge needed to enhance that advice.

If I do not know a particular regulator’s practice concerning an extremely niche issue, I will say so. I can explain what the written law says and, where possible, speak with colleagues who may have further insight. But if the issue calls for someone who works regularly with that regulator or specialises in that narrow field, bringing that person into the matter is better than pretending I possess a definitive answer.

Another important point is that whether a risk is ultimately too high or too low is not for the lawyer to determine. That is a commercial decision for the person running the business and paying your fees. My job is to assess and explain the risk. I may say, “I think this risk is too high,” or, “I think this is manageable if you are prepared to accept it.” But the client decides which risks the business is willing to take.

There are certainly occasions when I categorically advise a client not to proceed. I do that whenever it is necessary. But I also try to remain pragmatic, and I believe that is one reason I have successfully developed a client base in technology.

Clients generally already know when something is obviously impossible. Sometimes they approach a lawyer expecting a magical loophole, as if we are characters in a television drama who can produce an answer nobody else in the world has considered. That happens less than one per cent of the time.

In reality, the lawyer usually needs to lay out the advantages, disadvantages and consequences of the available approaches. Very little is genuinely black and white, especially in emerging technology. There may be no clear legislation or regulation. Even where a new regulatory framework exists, there may be no enforcement precedent showing how the regulator will apply it.

Sometimes the answer is to approach the regulator directly and seek its view. Even regulators do not always have an established enforcement position for every novel situation. In other cases, the most responsible answer is: this is what the law says; this is how analogous situations have generally been treated; this is what other market participants appear to be doing; and these are the risks that remain.

Depending on the jurisdiction, reliable market or enforcement data may not exist. You must then provide a considered answer based on the best information available without pretending that uncertainty has disappeared.

Keeping current requires constant study. A lawyer’s job is never to become comfortable. You must continue reading, following developments and learning. That is both one of the profession’s greatest blessings and one of its greatest curses. No matter how hard you try, the day you believe you have finally become an expert is the day you have lost your edge.

6. You were writing about disputes in the metaverse long before most lawyers were even discussing NFTs. What convinced you that these weren’t passing trends but genuine legal questions?

I will be blunt: disputes in the metaverse did pass as a trend, and NFTs have proved relatively irrelevant.

What has not become irrelevant is the underlying technology. Blockchain remains highly significant. Even when it falls out of the hype cycle, the largest players in the sector continue making major and interesting moves as the industry evolves and matures.

I saw value in the field for two reasons. First, it was a new and emerging market that older and more traditional lawyers would have to work extraordinarily hard to understand. My bet was that many established lawyers would not be interested in undertaking that work because, as people become older and more successful, they often become settled in their ways.

That created a prime opportunity for somebody like me. When I started down the technology law pathway seven or eight years ago, I was young, ambitious and hungry. I saw the opportunity to carve out a niche and build a name in an area that desperately needed people who understood it.

I still resist calling myself an expert because describing yourself that way can imply that you have finished studying. But I knew the sector would create genuine legal questions for a very simple reason: the amount of money moving through it. When that much value moves through a new technology, significant governmental, regulatory and legal attention is inevitable.

Governments and regulators are always slow. There is no doubt about that. But eventually, they catch up. I decided that this was a bet worth taking, and I would say the bet has paid off.

So the labels did not necessarily endure. The metaverse and NFTs were heavily overhyped. But the deeper proposition, that blockchain would create lasting commercial activity, regulatory attention and difficult legal questions, was correct.

7. If you could redesign legal education for 2035, what subjects would disappear, and what new subjects would every law student be required to study?

I would not change the curriculum. I would change how it is taught and what we test for.

In a post AI world, the ability to rattle off laws from memory is no longer particularly relevant. What matters is the ability to think, reason, rationalise and develop answers that, at least for now, technology cannot produce without meaningful human direction and judgment.

By 2035, legal education must become much more practice focused. It should prepare young lawyers to take over the world with the assistance of modern technology. The emphasis should be on teaching students how to think and how to use AI as a tool that supplements that thinking.

AI enabled lawyering should be a mandatory course in every law school. Students should learn how to use these systems properly, test their output and incorporate them into serious legal work. That is essential if they are going to keep pace with the strange and interesting ways in which society is developing and the legal profession is evolving.

The doctrinal subjects do not need to disappear. The systemic upgrade must take place in how those subjects are delivered and how students are assessed. Memorisation should give way to reasoning, practical application and the responsible use of technology.

That is not a minor curriculum adjustment. It is a fundamental change in what legal education is intended to produce.

8. Has there been a moment when a client, founder or entrepreneur completely changed your perspective on what lawyers should actually be doing?

The person who changed my perspective was not a client, founder or entrepreneur. It was a senior lawyer who was mentoring me.

He was the rainmaker of our office, and a very successful one. I never considered him the most technically astute lawyer in the team. He was certainly very good, but he was not the best technical lawyer. Yet he was the most successful lawyer in our team in the country.

That was precisely why I asked whether I could shadow him. He very graciously agreed, which itself demonstrated that he was comfortable in his own power.

He took me to a client meeting, and I watched him do the opposite of what I had seen many other private practice lawyers do. He answered questions. He shared practical perspectives. He spoke candidly and relatively unguardedly.

That does not mean he was foolhardy or failed to caveat positions when necessary. He simply was not afraid to use his experience and exercise judgment. To put it plainly, he was not scared.

He taught me that successful lawyers may specialise in a particular sector, but they are generalists by nature. You cannot convince a founder, entrepreneur or executive to trust you when the time comes to push the big red button if you can answer only one category of question.

If you cannot navigate beyond your narrow speciality, you may still be an excellent technical lawyer. You might draft the most beautiful submissions, statements of claim or witness statements imaginable, and there is undoubtedly a place for that. Every team needs people capable of grinding out exceptional specialist work.

But if you want to own client relationships and build a practice, you need enough knowledge to move confidently between the issues occupying the client’s mind. You should be capable of discussing a VAT issue, M&A concerns, regulatory and compliance problems, pre-dispute strategy and internal employment matters. Employment law is particularly important because employment problems are constantly at the forefront of clients’ minds.

When you can navigate between these areas with relative expertise, if not complete specialist expertise, you begin to build a genuine client relationship. That is why you surround yourself with a team of people who are more technically capable than you in their respective subspecialties. Your role is to bring in the client and give them confidence that the firm understands what it is doing. The specialists provide the deeper technical edge you may not personally possess.

I think that is largely a myth perpetuated by equity partners. If you want to become a genuine client relationship partner, you must be a generalist.

Watching that lawyer address the client’s myriad concerns was highly educational. It completely changed my understanding of what it takes to build the one thing that matters most between a lawyer and a client: a relationship of trust.

9. You spend your career thinking about the future. What is one legal problem that almost nobody is talking about today but will become impossible to ignore five years from now?

I hate to sound like a broken record, but the legal problem consuming my attention is the responsible use of AI within highly regulated financial businesses.

India’s regulator has already started introducing requirements around how AI should be used by regulated financial institutions. I expect those guardrails to become far more detailed as governments and regulators work out how to ensure that AI is used responsibly and does not replace human judgment.

AI should remain supplemental. It should not become a substitute for judgment. Yet many people are already becoming accustomed to using it as a replacement, developing intellectual laziness rather than using the technology to sharpen and accelerate their work. That is dangerous, and it will produce an entire category of new legal problems.

Artificial general intelligence does not presently exist. AI does not possess a separate legal personality. It cannot be held legally responsible for the decisions it makes or the advice it produces. Responsibility remains with the person providing the prompts, the institution deploying the system, and the human decision-makers relying on its output.

I believe we are going to enter a period in which “the AI made me do it” is seriously tested as a supposed defence to liability. Courts and regulators will have to determine what responsibility attaches to the people and institutions that deploy AI, fail to supervise it or rely on its output without exercising independent judgment.

To me, that is an extraordinarily exciting legal frontier.

10. Imagine we’re having this conversation ten years from now. What’s one prediction you would make today that people might laugh at but you’re convinced will become reality?

This may sound like doom and gloom, although I believe there is hope at the end of the rainbow: people will stop using banks.

Banks will largely be replaced by instantaneous digital-currency transactions conducted through self-custodial wallets. The idea that people should hand over all of their money to a third-party custodian will begin to look like a relic of the past.

If that happens, it will transform the very concept of financial services. The equivalents of Wall Street around the world could come crashing down as individuals gain the ability to hold and transfer value directly without depending on the traditional financial institutions that currently dominate the system.

You asked for a prediction that people might laugh at. That is mine.

It is time for the behemoth that is the financial-services sector to evolve or die.