About

Having initially worked at full-service law firms in Australia (Clayton Utz) and New Zealand (Bell Gully), Seshani Bala enjoyed the intellectual challenge that M&A and private equity deals provided, but had a passion for the commercial side of things and helping businesses find solutions to their problems. Shortly after securing her first in-house role in a fast moving consumer goods company, she realised that working in-house would help her combine her love of problem-solving, utilising technology solutions and working with people while also giving her the flexibility to deliver legal solutions in a much more innovative way.

Bala joined Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand (CA ANZ) as group general counsel in November 2015, leading legal support to the professional association and provider of higher education, representing over 110,000 chartered accountants globally. Her role involves managing CA ANZ’s legal team which advises the CA ANZ group on a broad range of legal, strategic, governance, risk and compliance matters across Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia and the UK. As a member of the CA ANZ executive leadership team, a critical part of her role involves advising it and the board on key strategic matters and empowering the legal team to function as an agile business enabler. In an ever-changing regulatory environment and an increasingly digital landscape, Bala argues that ‘lawyers need to learn the language of marketing and embrace technology [and] digital solutions to be effective in-house’. In her current role at CA ANZ, Bala’s legal team has successfully designed and implemented customised e-briefing systems and over 50 e-guides and approved legal e-precedents to empower the group to do business faster in a legally compliant way. She says that, ‘we combined our intimate understanding of CA ANZ’s business operations with automation and marketing prowess to design innovative e-briefing templates and e-precedents that have both the logic and regulatory compliance elements built into them to enable the business to give us consistent, relevant briefs which in turn enables the legal team to provider consistent, quick advice’. Bala’s team also hold twice-weekly “legal drop-in centres” for quick questions and invest significant time training key stakeholders, known in the firm as “legal whisperers”.

Bala has also been responsible for project managing CA ANZ’s global privacy and data security project to bring the business into line with the new standards in privacy regulation, the EU General Data Protection Regulation, giving the legal team the opportunity to deliver member-facing benefits, namely protecting the personal data members entrust to CA ANZ. During her tenure Bala has also made significant changes to how its legal department operates and services its internal clients, including the introduction of automation and legal operations which has drastically reduced turnaround times for supplier engagements.

By implementing a self-service legal support model for low risk and high volume matters and adopting a risk-based approach to all other matters, the legal team can focus on providing strategic advice on high risk or high value matters. On her leadership of the legal department, Bala says that it is important to encourage ‘a continuous improvement mind set – whatever we do, the legal team focuses on how we can do it better next time’. She adds: ‘We don’t give legal advice in a commercial vacuum, we’re never unhelpful and we always offer solutions and optional ways of achieving objectives’.