Could you tell us a bit about your significant successes in your role?

Delivering solid and effective business partnering to support the key priorities of six divisions, including the Hunter Valley, Interstate and General Counsel Division at the Australian Rail Track Corporation (ARTC), which consists of maintaining 8,500km of track, an annual revenue of over $900m and over 2000 employees. Successes include managing high-profile and complex projects whilst managing a high-performing team of four lawyers and continuing to partner with many colleagues across the business.

Recent successes include leading a variety of critical major ARTC Projects, including the Advanced Train Management System Project and National Train Communication System Project, the reinvigoration of the automation and standardisation of providing legal advice via a legal automation and contract management platform and managing large and complex legal issues, including regulatory, customer, procurement, safety, disputes and IT issues.

Other recent successes include being a member of the ARTC comprehensive Covid-19 steering committee and managing complex legal and interstate regulatory issues to keep our 8,500km network running during Covid-19.

What is the biggest risk to your industry, and how are you contributing to prepare your organisation for this?

Talent attraction and retention: The ‘great resignation’ is creating a risk to our industry. Lawyers are exiting the Covid-19 era with a real emphasis on work-life balance, flexibility and purpose. The lack of overseas qualified lawyers moving to Australia and the competitive remuneration packages offered by private practice law firms will require organisations like ours to offer greater incentives, attractive benefits and interesting work to retain talented and hard-working in-house counsel. Providing real flexibility to work from home regularly, rewarding our team for hard and quality work and promoting the team’s successes in the industry are strategies we adopt to address this risk.

Capacity and resourcing for projects: Another risk to our industry is the backlog of projects created during Covid-19. With these projects exiting the pipeline now, and with the Federal and State Government’s seeking to stimulate the economy, a significant risk is managing the increased workload to meet the needs of our customers and organisation during a challenging and busy period. My team has adopted several strategies to combat a high workload by creating focus and free time and ‘meeting-free days,’ utilising secondees on larger projects and implementing legal technology to achieve efficiency gains through the automation of particular workflows.

What challenges have you overcome to get to the position you are in today?

Graduating from the university during the GFC created the challenge of competing for significantly reduced available clerkship and graduate roles which required me to think outside the box on how to gain experience in the legal workplace. This open mindset led me to fantastic but challenging experiences as a paralegal working in Sydney on large-scale litigation cases to working as an associate to a Supreme Court Judge in the Northern Territory before taking the opportunity to return to Sydney to join a law firm as a junior lawyer. The challenge of taking the non-traditional route to gain experience as a lawyer gave me the lateral skills required to advance and gain experience to work as a Senior Legal Counsel in-house in a diverse and multi-faceted organisation.

My ARTC role in an asset-intensive, complex and diverse organisation requires me to flex my leadership style and manage complex groups of internal and external stakeholders. I have had to grow and extend my business partnering skills, develop new domain expertise and learn to provide practical and commercial solutions across various legal issues.