A lawyer by training, she spent a decade in tax advisory before moving into technology leadership. The role demands operational knowledge of how a legal practice works, analytical rigor developed over years of complex client work, and an instinct for change management. Here’s how she got there.

The specialization that set everything in motion

Johanna knows exactly when she decided to become a lawyer. It was 1997. She was 14 years old, on a family holiday in the United States. There, she watched an episode of Ally McBeal — the American legal comedy drama about a young female attorney in Boston. “I just decided that that’s what I want to be,” she says. “I want to become Ally.”

She studied law at the University of Gothenburg and spent four years looking for her specialism. She found it in the final year. “We had to specialize in something, and that's when I happened to stumble upon a course in international individual taxation. And it was so good.”

At a careers fair in her final semester, she reached out to Deloitte and was flagged as a talent, invited to Stockholm for two days to meet partners and professionals across departments. She was offered a position before she'd even finished her degree. “This was during 2008,” she says. “The financial crisis. So I realized I had an enormous amount of luck at the beginning of my career.”

The moment that changed her direction

Over the next decade, Johanna built her career at Deloitte as a tax advisor. She managed one of the department's biggest engagements — a large corporation on the west coast of Sweden. Then, during her second maternity leave, the client was lost. Deloitte's audit team had won the company as an audit client which meant, under professional standards, the firm could no longer deliver certain tax services to them.

She went to her managers and told them she had lost her motivation. “I'm lucky to have had really good managers at Deloitte,” she says. “They didn't take the fact that I came to them as a sign of low ambition. Instead, they tried to find a different direction that fit my profile.”

She was put in charge of a team working on processes and global technology around compliance work: the production of income tax returns, a high-volume service the firm delivers at scale. From there, she moved progressively into broader business development. In 2023, she was appointed CTO for Tax & Legal Sweden. The timing, she says, was everything, because it “happened right as AI was entering everyone's life.”

What tax specifically demands of AI

Tax is one of the hardest proving grounds for AI in the legal world. A lot of legal work, Johanna points out, is fundamentally domestic. You operate within one jurisdiction, applying one set of rules. Tax is different: “In a single matter, you’re navigating domestic law, and tax treaties, and EU directives, and OECD guidance, and how all of these interact is generally very complex,” she explains.

Tax is a political instrument, which means the volume of change is significantly higher than in most legal disciplines. “AI makes it easier for us to stay up to date, but the challenge for the AI side of it is that all of this material is not publicly available. It’s ultimately the quality of the underlying data that determines how useful an AI tool can be.”

Then there is the problem of time. “AI struggles with understanding and weighing legal sources against each other in relation to time. Which source is current? Does a new position override existing case law? Does the change apply retroactively?” In tax, getting that wrong can have significant financial consequences.

And then there’s the quantitative dimension. “Tax is unusually technical in a quantitative sense, with thresholds, rates, and calculation methods where a margin difference in a figure can change the entire legal outcome. The precision requirements go beyond what most areas of law demand.”

A practice that doesn’t stand still

Johanna's team in Sweden develops and maintains the technology and processes that underpin the Swedish firm's tax and legal delivery. The tools are, by design, highly specific – from tax engines that calculate tax correctly under Swedish tax law, to processes that align local practice with global standards.

“Our deliverables need to look and feel the same, regardless of where we are in the world,” she says. “The processes, and perhaps what is visible, need to be standardized. But the tools we use to actually produce what we deliver are often very specific for each geography.”

The team's guiding principle captures the philosophy neatly: “Whatever we did last year is not what we're going to do this year.” It is, she says, perhaps what she's most proud of — not a specific product or deployment, but the culture of perpetual forward motion. “It keeps us moving forward, and being able to get that message across to my leadership — that is what my works is all about.”

The argument for buying over building

The question of when to build something internally versus bringing in a specialist tool is one Johanna thinks about carefully. Integration is a critical factor. “If we’re going to deploy AI agents, then it all comes down to the integrations between systems. They can’t be isolated islands.” Technology has to function as an ecosystem, not a collection of standalone tools.

“Deloitte has huge resources when it comes to building technology,” she acknowledges. “But it's my belief that we’re moving towards co-developing with software companies rather than building a lot ourselves. It's not our core business to build technology. And it's really hard to keep pace with everything that’s happening.”

It was this thinking that shaped how Legora entered Deloitte. The contact came through the legal team in Sweden, who encountered the platform early on. “When I saw it, I was convinced this was the right tool for us,” Johanna says. She worked closely with a colleague who had just become certified in information security to drive Legora through Deloitte's rigorous risk and compliance processes. She then built the case alongside her Norwegian CTO counterpart, and together they brought global leadership on board, ultimately leading to a global rollout.

“That's the kind of work that doesn't happen on its own,” she says. “You have to believe in it, and push for it, and bring people with you at every level.”

The speedboat and tanker analogy comes naturally to her when she reflects on why that partnership matters. “Startups like Legora are like quick speedboats and we are more of a tanker.” That asymmetry, she argues, is exactly why the relationship works. “With that speed, it's better to buy and co-develop.”

What the next generation of lawyers needs to understand

Johanna talks about junior lawyers with a clarity that comes from having watched the profession change around her. The anxiety in legal education circles — that AI will make the knowledge lawyers train for redundant — is one she meets with a more pragmatic argument. “The real value of those years in university is the analytical part of it, and learning the legal method. Not just looking at a question and writing an answer, but really understanding the question and the underlying legal problem. That’s key.”

“As a lawyer, you can’t put yourself in the centre. You can’t start from your own perspective and what you know. You have to put yourself in the client's shoes, understand the client's perspective, understand what they know and what they might not know, and the environment they're operating in.”

The shift in focusing on the client and their perspective is fundamental, she argues. “I don't think it's discussed enough or at all in law school.”

Her advice to juniors entering the profession now is to be curious, to be more outspoken, and to ask questions. “There’s no such thing as a stupid question. Speak your mind, even if you're not 100% sure — because you’ll learn from those conversations.”

And as AI takes on more of the operational work, the human dimension of the profession becomes more important, not less: “We need to be the thinkers and relationship builders. AI becomes brilliant in everything operational. Then we need to focus even more on the ‘people side’ of things.”

The importance of forward momentum and looking ahead

The thread that runs through Johanna's career is a consistent orientation toward what's coming rather than what's established. “I cannot be semi-content,” she says. “I need to feel excitement, otherwise I do something about it.” That disposition, in a profession navigating one of the most significant shifts in how legal work gets done, is vital.

“My purpose in life is to get things started, to create movement, be part of movement,” Johanna says. “If something stops moving — if I'm expected to just manage or maintain something — I tend to switch off.”

“What motivates me is being part of the change, and being part of where things are happening,” she says. “Contributing to the development of Deloitte as a firm, and the people working here, so that we can serve our clients in the best possible way.”

In that sense, the current moment in AI is, she says, close to perfect. “Everything going on around AI, everything happening in society, combined with working inside an enormous firm with all of these different dimensions to navigate — I think that suits me pretty well.”