Naeem Bawla – Dapper Labs

“The role of in-house counsel is about to change more in the next five years than it has in the last fifty—and for most lawyers, that uncertainty is unsettling.”

Naeem Bawla | Dapper Labs | VP, Legal & Business Affairs and Deputy General Counsel

Law students and junior lawyers are asking the same question: what does my future even look like?

It’s a fair concern. Artificial intelligence is already reshaping how legal work gets done. Today, nearly 85% of legal professionals are already using generative AI to assist with tasks like research, drafting, and document review. Tasks that once defined the early years of a legal career—research, drafting, issue spotting—are being automated or augmented. The traditional paths into law, long viewed as stable and predictable, feel less certain than they once did.

At the same time, the disruption is real. Some projections suggest that up to 89% of document review work and over 60% of junior-level legal tasks could be automated in the coming years. It’s no surprise that uncertainty is rising.

But Naeem Bawla sees it differently.

“AI is going to increase the demand for [tech] lawyers,” he says. “Just not for the role we’ve traditionally played, those roles are going extinct.”

In his view, the uncertainty facing young lawyers isn’t a signal of contraction—it’s an opening. A chance to redefine what it means to be a lawyer, in the same way other industries have been reshaped by technology before them.

Building a career with a blueprint

That belief isn’t theoretical. It’s rooted in how his own career unfolded. If you’ve held an account at JPMorgan, Coinbase, or Scotiabank, you’ve likely interacted with systems he helped build or operationalize along the way. But those milestones are less important than what they represent.

Bawla didn’t start with a clear path. He didn’t come from pedigree, and he didn’t land in Big Law out of school. Graduating into the Great Recession, the strongest offer he received was $60,000—far below the expectations that had justified taking on more than $200,000 in student debt.

At the time, the legal market had little room for ideal trajectories. So he pivoted into compliance, a field that was still emerging in the aftermath of the financial crisis.

And by his own admission, he struggled.

“It didn’t come naturally,” he says. “But I just kept working.”

That became the pattern. Start behind. Work relentlessly. Close the gap.

By the end of law school, after a slow start, he graduated with one of the highest GPAs in his program. In compliance, he went from underperforming to one of the strongest contributors on his team. Over time, he began to see something others missed—an inefficiency in how compliance talent was being staffed.

So he took a risk.

He left stability behind and built his own firm, betting on his ability to figure things out as he went. It wasn’t a smooth ride. There were years of grinding through client development, operations, and delivery with no institutional backing and no guarantee it would work. But what started small grew into a multimillion-dollar business and eventually became one of the fastest-growing companies in the United States.

From the outside, it looked like success. But internally, something hadn’t changed.

“Despite my relative success, I still had a chip on my shoulder. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t just luck,” he says.

That chip became a constant source of fuel.

From legal adviser to business architect

To put his concern to the test, he joined Dapper Labs—the blockchain technology company behind NBA Top Shot—at the height of its growth in 2021.

At Dapper Labs, the pattern repeated itself in a different form. Surrounded by people from elite institutions, FAANG companies, and high-profile startup successes, he could have seen his lack of tech pedigree as a limitation.

Instead, he used it as leverage.

“You can use your circumstances as an excuse, or you can use them as fuel,” he says. “I think the latter is more productive.”

That mindset shaped how he approached his role at Dapper. After building the compliance function, he moved into product counsel—a role that was barely defined and had no established playbook.

So he created it.

The work required more than legal expertise. It meant thinking through every feature, update, or product decision from the user’s perspective—while simultaneously weighing regulatory risk, commercial upside, and long-term strategy. It required navigating privacy, litigation exposure, consumer protection, and partnerships in real time.

“You have to know enough to be dangerous in everything, all at once,” he says.

In many ways, it became training for what the role of in-house counsel is evolving into. Not just advisors, but operators—and increasingly, architects of risk systems.

Lawyers are no longer being asked simply to identify risk. They’re being asked to design the agentic systems that determine which risks a business should take, which ones it should avoid, and how those decisions scale across a product or platform. The role is shifting from gatekeeper to decision-maker—someone embedded in the business, helping shape outcomes rather than reacting to them.

That’s the lesson he believes applies most directly to the current generation of lawyers.

There is no longer a single, clearly defined path. And for many, that feels like a loss of stability.

“But that’s actually your biggest advantage,” he says. “You get to define what a successful career as a lawyer looks like now.”

That doesn’t make the process easier. If anything, it demands more. More initiative, more adaptability, and more willingness to operate without a clear roadmap. His own advice to junior lawyers is direct: pick one thing outside your core legal function—a product area, a technology, a business unit—and go deep. Become the person who actually understands it, not just advises on it. That’s where the leverage is.

But it also expands what’s possible.

For Bawla, the dots only connected in hindsight. At each stage, the next step wasn’t obvious—it was something he had to figure out through action, effort, and a willingness to bet on himself.

The same dynamic is now playing out across the legal industry.

Despite fears of displacement, the long-term outlook tells a different story. Overall employment for lawyers is still projected to grow over the next decade, with new roles emerging around AI oversight, strategy, and governance.

Now, his focus is on AI—specifically how it will reshape legal systems and decision-making.

AI will change the profession. That much is certain.

What’s less certain is who will adapt—and how. The lawyers who do will be the ones who stopped waiting for the path to appear and started building it themselves. That’s not a new skill. It’s just one the profession is finally being asked to use.