Jeanne Kelly has seen a lot of changes over two decades as an intellectual property, privacy and tech lawyer. She remembers sitting at home in Dún Laoghaire at the turn of the millennium. She was a young lawyer and part of a small team within A&L Goodbody that was set up to tackle Y2K.

Also known as the millennium bug, Y2K, was a fear that developed in the late 1990s that the world’s computers would crash when they were unable to recognise the year 2000. “I was afraid to go out on New Year’s Eve,” Kelly recalls. “So I was sitting at home with my giant mobile phone because we thought planes were going to fall out of the sky and hit us and everyone was going to start litigating that night!” By 2am, it was clear nothing was going to happen. “Finally, we could have a few drinks,” she laughed. 

Now a founding partner of Browne Jacobson in Ireland, Kelly has been at the coalface as a new wave of tech investors came into Ireland for 25 years. With her colleague Ciaran Markey, she leads the Dublin office of a British firm which employs 1,000 people and has strong Irish connections. The head of its commercial and technology group Declan Cushley is from Derry, while its London head of technology, outsourcing and digital transformation Anthony Nagle hails from Kerry. 

Kelly left an equity partner position in Irish firm LK Shields to take up her new job. She said she first got to know her new employer in the mid-noughties at law conferences in Britain. “I got to know Declan Cushley quite well as a result,” she said. Browne Jacobson started to refer work to her, so she has a business relationship with it for 15 years. Kelly had no intention, however, of going anywhere as in October 2021 she was made head of IP, technology and data privacy in LK Shields. 

“I was happy where I was,” Kelly said. Cushley asked her for a coffee and she assumed it was to discuss more potential referral work. “Then I realised it was about the opportunity to lead something along with Ciaran (Markey),” she said. Markey was also a partner in LK Shields and he was joining Browne Jacobson as a founding partner too. 

“I’m 50 this year,” Kelly said. “I wanted to be part of a 10- to 20-person firm focusing on IP and IT and privacy.” Markey specialised in litigation, while Kelly tends to do less contentious work. “He’s the fighter and I’m the lover,” Kelly laughed. 

“When I started, there might have been one person in each firm who did a bit of technology law.”

Jeanne Kelly grew up in Mullingar as the daughter of two psychiatric nurses. She wanted to be a journalist but she decided to try law in UCD first and never looked back. She did an Erasmus year in France, and then a summer work placement in McCann FitzGerald. She thought about becoming a barrister, but the prospect of years of unpaid or lowly paid deviling was something she couldn’t afford. 

She went instead to A&L Goodbody where she worked in the relatively emerging fields of intellectual property, IT and data protection corporate practice. It was 1998, and all three areas were starting to boom in Ireland as a new wave of tech-led foreign direct investment came here. 

“When I started, there might have been one person in each firm who did a bit of technology law,” she recalled. “It wasn’t like it is today.” In her almost seven years with A&L, she found herself part of a growing team of about 15 people advising tech companies. “There were maybe 100 people in the corporate team, and we were seen as the dorky types.” 

By the time she moved to Mason Hayes & Curran (MHC) in 2005, it was a different story as technology, IP and privacy had become hugely important. Dublin’s Silicon Docks had taken off, driven by companies like Facebook, Google, Salesforce and Twitter. Kelly said she couldn’t name her clients, but MHC became specialists fulfilling the needs of this new breed of tech companies, which used vast amounts of data to generate billions in sales. 

Kelly was promoted to technology and IP partner in the firm but she didn’t have a stake in the business. In 2017, LK Shields, a mid-sized law firm, convinced her to leave by offering her that. “I didn’t want to just be a salary partner,” Kelly said. “I wanted to be an equity partner.” Kelly said back then – and still – not enough women “get into that equity layer” so she felt she had to take the opportunity when it was offered. Her friend Peter Bolger was joining LK Shields too at the same time, so that made the decision easier. “I’d worked together with Peter for years so I knew we could do it again.” Kelly spent five years with LK Shields. “You had a stake in the business so you could influence it a bit better,” she said. 

Browne Jacobson’s office is starting with a team of ten people on Fitzwilliam Square. The office is in the same building as where she used to work with MHC before it relocated from Barrow Street. It is, she admits, achingly hip, as a fully serviced office managed by Iconic Offices. Kelly said she was hitting the ground running. “We’re already busy. We have UK clients that have stuff to be done in Ireland and there is a lot of foreign direct investment work from America.”

In Britain, Browne Jacobson offers a service called “Instant In House” that, for a fixed-price retainer, allows clients to tap into its legal expertise. “In the UK, there are high-volume users who want to have someone remotely in our office who will always be available to them,” Kelly explains. She said many companies had an in-house lawyer but this allowed them to use Browne Jacobson to scale up during busy times, cover holidays, or bring in specialist expertise. “We can give that extra bit of bandwidth that is sometimes needed,” Kelly said. “We think an Instant In House model might work for Ireland.” 

From competition to consolidation

Both KPMG and EY have or plan to set up legal services divisions. How will this impact the Irish law market? “It is interesting,” Kelly said. “For me, it wasn’t tempting. There are all sorts of conflict and regulatory issues that are not that easy to cut through. But (the accountancy firms) have very good people and I think they are formidable competitors in an already competitive market.”

Kelly said she expected more mergers will happen between overseas firms and Irish ones, as well as Irish firms with other Irish firms. “There will be consolidation in the next five to ten years,” she said. “But independence is important too. I think there will be owners of law firms who don’t want to share ownership (with overseas firms) and will maybe team up – or just keep on trucking.”

Would Browne Jacobson buy another Irish law firm? “We haven’t really thought about it to be honest,” she said. “I think we will probably just try and grow organically as the work comes in.”

There are predictions that high inflation and interest rate rises might cause a recession next year. “I’ve been through two or three recessions and the dot-com collapse,” Kelly said. “Personal relationships are really important during these times.”

Is Brexit a factor in Browne Jacobson’s decision to come here? “It’s not really Brexit-related, it’s mostly client-driven. They have clients that need work done in Ireland.”

“They see Ireland as a bridge to the US. There is an acknowledgement in the UK that you need an EU presence to be that bridge for foreign direct investment so that’s more of a driver than Brexit.” 

Kelly on GDPR and the DPC

The General Data Protection Regulation was introduced in 2018, creating a renewed need for legal advice. “There were data privacy laws before GDPR but they had no teeth,” Kelly said. Kelly has worked in the area from about 2006 so it is an area of expertise for her. She said Browne Jacobson offered a full service from commercial advice to litigation. “That was compelling for me, being able to do both,” she said. “And then you have 1,000 people in the UK too, so there is a lot behind you.”

The Data Protection Commissioner Helen Dixon has been in situ since 2014 during a period of intense focus on how tech giants use people’s data. Does her office have enough resources? “She’s become more well-resourced,” Kelly said. “But the pressure is always going to be there to do more, particularly from our EU member state partners. She could certainly do with more resources and more people.”

Kelly said Browne Jacobson was committed to diversity and inclusion, and that was another reason she joined the firm. “The very first conversation I had with them was about social mobility and the law,” Kelly said. “And what can we bring to the Irish market that’s a bit different.” Like many indigenous partners, she said, she’d had approaches from overseas firms but this one gained traction. “I liked the cut of their jib,” Kelly said. “They’re a very human firm that has grown impressively from 200 or 300 up to 1,000 people in the last number of years.”

She said the firm, with offices in Manchester, Birmingham, Exeter and Nottingham as well as London, specialised in finding recruits that did not go to Oxford or Cambridge like those who populate many big law firms in England. “Browne Jacobson has taken concrete steps to hire more Black, Asian, minority ethnic people,” she said. One way it did this was to drop grade requirements, which had prevented some graduates being hired. Kelly said that 48 per cent of the firm’s graduate intake this year came from these backgrounds. “Obviously we have to make sure they rise through the firm and become partners too, but it is an important start,” she added. 

“Women of my generation in the law, we all have scary stories.”

In October, Kelly will mark 25 years as a solicitor. Are there enough women at the top in Irish law firms? “No there is not. But that said, I remember when people were being sent home for wearing trouser suits. I think there is a better understanding now that you have to be in favour of diversity to succeed in a law firm. Some of it is very genuine… but some of it is pay-to-play buying a table at an event so you win an award for inclusion. There is optics but things have also genuinely changed.”  

“Women of my generation in the law, we all have scary stories. We all have stuff that, looking back on it, you’d be horrified if it happened to your daughter… and I think we all want to make that not happen now. In the end, it is about deeds, not words.” 

Kelly said there were structural things that still prevented women rising as quickly as men within law firms. “Most law firms don’t allow a sabbatical until you’re an equity partner of a number of years’ standing. I know of only very few women who have ever gotten that because they don’t get to the ownership level until much later. There is a little bit of a boys’ club but I think even within the boys’ club, there is a consciousness now that they have to take certain measures.” 

Kelly said she used to go to legal events where many tables would be all male, and that was now much rarer. “People are starting to make a more structural effort to change things,” Kelly said. She said law firms can see they are losing female talent to in-house roles as maternity leave and other policies were more progressive. “The challenge for all law firms is to persuade people that they can build their careers in private practice,” Kelly said. “But it is definitely a challenge as there is a greater variety of work that can be done in-house than ever before. Firms that want to hold onto their staff have to be able to offer them interesting work.”