About

Healius is one of Australia’s leading listed healthcare companies with a commitment to supporting quality, affordable and accessible healthcare. Its senior legal counsel for employment law Louisa Manfre started her career with Herbert Smith Freehills, where she spent more than four years and was responsible for providing strategic and commercial legal advice to many of the largest private and publicly-listed organisations in Australia. In May 2017, she joined Primary Health Care (now known as Healius) as corporate counsel – labour and employment and was soon promoted to senior legal counsel – employment law in October 2018. Manfre is a highly-praised in-house counsel, and as one colleague says: ‘Despite being junior in terms of years of service, Manfre’s abilities were so great that she clearly exceeded the abilities of other lawyers who had many times more experience than her. She has sought to refine her technical legal abilities through understanding the commercial interest of the business, to a point where she is heavily relied upon by the board and the executives on all matters relating to employment and industrial law. In meetings involving the most important stakeholders in our business, she regularly commands the room and is looked upon for not only legal guidance, but also commercial guidance. She truly is a rising star’. Recently Manfre has worked on the A$18m underpayment matter which was announced to the ASX by Primary Health Care (as it was then known) in October 2018. ‘The matter was not only interesting from a personal development perspective, in that I was required to leverage my employment law experience through numerous non-legal domains including HR, operations and payroll, but was also interesting from the public and political perspective due to the recent exponential increase of Australian companies publicly reporting underpayment matters. In this matter, I relished the opportunity to utilise my legal abilities to deliver an outcome that was in the public’s best interest’, she states. Manfre considers the proudest achievement of her in-house career to be working on the remediation project to ensure that many employees received their legal employment entitlements. ‘It has been rewarding to hear stories from employees who received a payment, and who would have otherwise been unaware of their entitlement, and the positive impact this has made on their lives. It has allowed me to maintain my connection to the public, which is ultimately who I serve in my profession’, she says. In the future, Manfre thinks that artificial intelligence and automation is going to greatly change the landscape of practice for all lawyers, regardless of their speciality areas or whether they are in-house counsel or work in private practice. In her view, ‘the greatest impact of AI and automation on the role of a lawyer is that we will be strategic advisors, advising on complex issues and specialty knowledge, rather than undertaking transactional work. This will in turn lead to a closer relationship between the company and its lawyers’. According to Manfre, the most important skill for general counsels of the future will be their commercial and strategic acumen. ‘Businesses will always expect their legal advisors to have a high level of technical skill at a minimum, but what really distinguishes the best legal advisors are those who truly understand business objectives and are able to effectively communicate useful advice which accounts for the commercial perspective. I am a firm believer that the best legal advice is not given in a vacuum, but rather gives due weight to the contextual circumstances surrounding the request for advice’, she comments.