Failing Forward.

I grew up thinking law meant suits and courtrooms. I planned to study medicine in the USA. That door closed. Law opened — and it turned out to be the better door, even if I didn't know it at the time. Every fall was forward.

My LLB at the University of the Free State took 6.5 years. I want to be upfront about that rather than bury it. I came from a science and maths background and switched to a language-heavy discipline. I needed the time to make the transition properly — and somewhere in the middle of it, I discovered that the gap between law and technology was the most interesting place to stand.

In 2024 I processed 150,000 pages of discovery documents as part of a 3-person team on a high-profile financial crime case at a prominent law firm — under court deadlines, zero confidentiality breaches. I presented oral arguments before an acting judge at the BLA Trial Advocacy program and received commendation for my legal reasoning. I managed three concurrent litigation files at LEAD — motor vehicle accident, defamation, criminal defence — each with different procedural requirements and competing deadlines. I earned distinctions in Criminal Procedure (80%), Legal Practice (79%), and Public Law (77%).

Then I came home to Mpumalanga, taught myself Python, and built an autonomous AI system to run my job search. It sent 130 applications. I got 4 interviews. One of them — at a leading tech law firm I'd genuinely admired — went to two rounds. They offered me R22,000 in the first interview before ultimately declining on capacity grounds. That one stung. I'm still processing it. But I'm still building.