About

Editor’s note: This interview was conducted prior to March 2020.

What are the most important transactions and litigations that you have been involved in during the last two years?

I was a key stakeholder in the end-to-end business process review of lending practices, advising on the art of the possible for document automation, electronic signatures and contract management. I led a risk-based review of loan and ancillary documentation, redesigning and revamping documents to be more client-centric by being written plainly and removing legal jargon. I was also involved in supporting transformation by designing and delivering learning sessions to employees across the organisation.

I also led the crisis management team activities within the legal, compliance and investigations functions for an alleged privacy breach. Marshalling resources and strategy across more than 10 jurisdictions and multiple cross-functional teams, to provide guidance on advising regulators and insurers, applying legal privilege best practices to mitigate litigation risk and supporting customer-focused harm-mitigation strategies.

How do you feel in-house legal leaders can successfully introduce and implement a culture within a legal department?

A key role of in-house leaders is to make sense of the role and work of the legal team within the strategic goals of the organisation. Leaders need to understand how the legal department is currently used and received by the organisation and find opportunities for the team to be involved in processes or engagements – to do the right work by the right people.

Optimism is key – it keeps us moving forward and overcome obstacles. Optimism also enhances our creativity because when we expect that it will be better or solved, we can think about our challenges from different directions and be more innovative.

How do you suggest in-house lawyers build strong relationships with business partners within their company?

Listen more than you talk, and listen carefully. Sometimes the question you are asked is not the question they need answered and there is great value in teasing out the symptoms and not just accepting their diagnosis of the issue.

Enquire with humility and empathy. When you are providing assistance, step into the shoes of your colleague and think about their goals, incentive and how they are experiencing this. Empathy is something everyone can enhance with deliberate effort – and the virtues of being empathetic extend beyond the workplace.

Be enthusiastic about what your colleagues are doing. They are often trying to be successful and meet expectations of clients and their teams. Lawyers are very good at catastrophising and often have a special ability to spot all kinds of risks. That is a key part of the role, but our value comes from helping illuminate the biggest risks and offering solutions for different ways to mitigate them – and that advice is much better received with some enthusiasm and investment of time and energy in the underlying venture.

What techniques do you use to provide commercially-focused advice to your company, and how do you communicate these to more junior lawyers in the team?

Our goal should be to give good advice that our colleagues understand – not to prove that we are the smartest person in the room! Plain writing is critical to your effectiveness. As lawyers, we can use a lot of jargon, which obscures the advice that we give. We also tend to write in an essay style (as opposed to newspaper style) and want to lay out our understanding and every assumption made before giving advice. This can dilute understanding and impact and frustrate our colleagues.

You should embrace your multi-faceted perspectives as shareholders, clients, colleagues and lawyers to provide practical, risk-based advice to help advance the interests of the organisation. Think about how you would feel if you got this advice, delivered in this way, about something unfamiliar to you – how would you feel?

We also need to support each other when we take risks. Our business colleagues take risks and are rewarded for taking good ones, and learn from the poor ones. In-house lawyers often get caught up applying a private practice mentality of defensive practice. Once you are in-house, you are an employee and your role is to help our colleagues take smart risks.

FOCUS ON: INNOVATION

This is an incredible time to practice law – clients, economic forces and technology are changing how law is delivered and by whom. Law firms are adapting to evolving client needs and bringing great resourcefulness to innovate, but many of the most innovative lawyers are in-house and supporting in-house teams.

In-house lawyers have a tremendous opportunity to marry our understanding of legal principles with their understanding of the organisation to bring transformative change. As in-house advisors, linked to the successes and challenges of the organisations we work for, we are incented to create value. When in-house lawyers are at their best, we do the following:

Bring mental agility to adapt our thinking quickly to address new challenges.

Don’t just react to what comes to us, but seek out challenges and offer our help, confident that we have something valuable to offer.

Are optimistic, proactive, creative and solutions-oriented, bringing our unique training and perspective to the table with colleagues to solve problems.

With the day-to-day experiences of in-house lawyers with the productive power of different perspectives applied to an issue, the next level opportunity for us is to leverage diversity beyond role or expertise. When we invite and make welcome perspectives derived from lived experiences along race, religion, sexuality, ability, geography, social-economic status and gender, we will give diverse perspectives a voice and opportunity to contribute to the conversation so we better understand each other and our clients.

Some conversations will be awkward and difficult, and some ideas may get lost along the way. However, we only grow and learn when we expose ourselves to new things. We have so much to gain professionally and personally by building a truly inclusive workplace where we can fully participate as our authentic selves to achieve our potential for innovation. In-house lawyers are well placed to build and model the power of an inclusive workplace for our organisations, and broader society – let’s do it!