Eirini C. Lika is the founder of Eirini C Lika, LLM International Boutique Law Practice, an international boutique based in Frankfurt, Germany. She is admitted as a lawyer in Greece, as a Solicitor in England and Wales, and as a lawyer in Germany — three jurisdictions, three languages, one point of contact. She holds LL.M. degrees from King's College London and the University of Mannheim, completed her studies in AI Law, Policy and Governance at the London School of Economics, and holds an AI Officer certification. Her practice focuses on AI governance, EU AI Act compliance, FinTech regulation, cross-border transactions, and contract work at the intersection of technology and law.
I asked Eirini what led her to start her own firm.
"Owning my own firm was always the dream," she told me. "At some point I stopped waiting for the right moment and made the decision. It was drastic, but it did not feel reckless to me. It felt like the most honest thing I had ever done."
The independence behind that decision is older than the firm. She grew up in a small village in Greece, raised by her grandparents while her parents built a new life in Germany, and developed a spirit of independence that would define everything that followed. At seventeen, her father escorted her to London to study, stayed a few days, and left. She was alone again — a young woman in a foreign country, no one to fall back on, building a life from the first day.
"That is where my resilience was forged," she said. "I learned that I could be dropped into the unknown and not only survive it but make it mine."
Her professional path moved with the markets first, and then with the technology. She started in Big Law in banking and finance, moved through ship finance and maritime law in Greece, came into investment management through her husband, and since 2022 has turned her focus decisively to tech, FinTech, and the regulation around them. Each stage built on the one before it. Finance taught her how deals are structured. Regulation taught her where the limits sit. Now the technology is rewriting both at once.
Before the firm, she had survived Big Law, held several in-house roles, and built a hedge fund and a FinTech startup alongside her husband. She learned a great deal in each of them. But something was missing.
"I was always executing someone else's judgment on case strategy," she said. "I wanted to be the one deciding how a case is run — guiding the procedure, shaping the strategy, deciding how and when to settle. People call it ownership. For me it was never about money."
"I did not want to execute someone else's judgment. I wanted to exercise my own."
There was also a pause — a deliberate step back from the law to raise her daughter and be present for her husband through a difficult illness. She does not tell that part as a wound. She tells it as a cost she accepted, and as the experience that clarified what she was building toward. Returning to the profession after a break, she felt the weight of an assumption the legal world rarely names.
"Returning to law after a break is hard in a way the profession does not like to admit," she said. "The field does not wait for you. The regulation moves, the work moves, and there is an unspoken assumption that a gap is a weakness. I felt that. Rebuilding momentum, proving again that I belonged, doing it while still carrying everything at home — that was its own test."
"The gap is not the weakness. The profession's assumption about the gap is."
It is also part of why she built her own firm the way she did. She mentors young women in multiple networks and tells them the same thing: a non-linear path is not a disadvantage. The profession may treat it as one, but that is the profession's limitation, not theirs.
Today she carries two roles at once — the lawyer and the business owner — and the way she holds them together is structural. "Every morning, before anything else, I write my notes: the tasks for each case, the shape of the day, what matters and in what order," she said. "That structure is what lets me carry a growing caseload without losing focus."
Boundaries are still something she works on. She takes the work home — she admits that openly. But for her, the work is not a burden. "It is not only about arguing the law," she said. "It is about persuasion and preparation. That is the part I love. The hours do not feel like a sacrifice. They feel like the thing I chose."
What she is building now points further ahead. A larger office. A growing team of attorneys. A hybrid way of working — automated workflows that carry clients to their goals faster, without ever lowering the standard. She is not building a firm that replaces lawyers with software. She is building one where the routine, repeatable parts of the work run on systems, so that a lawyer's judgment is spent where it matters.
She points to Garfield.Law — the first purely AI-driven law firm authorised by the Solicitors Regulation Authority in England and Wales — as a proof of concept for the direction she is heading. Its scope is narrow, but the precedent is not: a regulator has accepted that a technology-led firm can deliver regulated legal services, provided a solicitor stays accountable for every output.
"My direction is different," she said. "I am not automating one narrow process. I am building cross-border regulatory and contract work on top of disciplined workflows, with my own judgment at the centre. That is the line I want to work along: efficiency inside the rules, never around them."
She does not believe in the billable hour. She works on fixed fees, agreed at the outset. The efficiency she gains, she gives back to the client as speed, lower cost, and access.
"I am building a firm that reflects who I am," she said — "resilient, independent, and unwilling to compromise on the craft."
Are you a business or individual navigating AI governance, FinTech regulation, or cross-border legal matters in Germany, Greece, or the UK? Connect with Eirini C. Lika and check out Eirini C Lika, LLM International Boutique Law Practice.