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Speaking the Language of Business: Corporate Communication Tips from In-House Counsel
What area(s) of law does this episode consider? | Effectively communicating with corporate clients |
Why is this topic relevant? | Communication is an important skill for all lawyers to have, but when you’re working with corporate clients, it’s not enough to provide technically correct advice – you need to ensure it’s understood, actionable, and aligned with the client’s business objectives. Whether you’re an in-house counsel embedded within the organisation or an external practitioner advising from the outside, how you deliver your advice can be just as important as the advice itself. For in-house counsel, communication is even more of an art form. They’re right there in the thick of it, bridging the gap between legal requirements and business realities. They’re translating tricky legal concepts into plain English, managing risks, and giving advice that doesn’t just say “no” but shows a path forward. External lawyers working with corporate clients face similar challenges – they have to adapt their advice to align with the client’s business priorities without losing sight of the legal fundamentals. |
What are the practical takeaways? |
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Show notes | Mel’s Podcast, ‘The Counsel Podcast’ |
DT = David Turner; MS = Mel Storey
00:00:00 | DT: | Hello and welcome to Hearsay the Legal Podcast, a CPD podcast that allows Australian lawyers to earn their CPD points on the go and at a time that suits them. I’m your host, David Turner. Hearsay the Legal Podcast is proudly supported by Lext Australia. Lext’s mission is to improve user experiences in the law and legal services, and Hearsay the Legal Podcast is how we’re improving the experience of CPD. Now, as we all know, communication is an important skill for all lawyers to have but when you’re working with corporate clients, it’s not enough to provide technically correct advice. You need to ensure that it’s understood, actionable and it’s aligned with the client’s business goals and objectives. If you’re an in-house counsel embedded within the organisation or an external practitioner advising from the outside, maybe you’re a fractional GC, an increasingly common and popular term these days, how you deliver your advice can be just as important as the advice itself, maybe even more so. For in-house counsel, communication is an art form. They’re right there in the thick of it, bridging the gap between legal requirements and business realities in different business functions in the organisation. They’re translating tricky legal concepts into plain English, managing risks, and giving advice that doesn’t just say ‘no’ but shows a path forward. External lawyers working with corporate clients face similar challenges. They have to adapt their advice to align with business priorities without losing sight of the legal fundamentals and their ethical obligations. So how do we master this skill? How do you make sure that your advice is practical, actionable, it hits the mark for your corporate clients? But it still meets your ethical obligations and an accurate view of the law. That’s what we’re going to dive into today, sharing strategies to refine your communication and become the kind of lawyer businesses can’t live without. Joining me today is Mel Storey, Head of Legal Asia Pacific at Pax8. Mel is also the host of her own legal podcast for in-house lawyers called Counsel – you should go and have a listen to that one after you’re finished here. With her experience working in-house along with her knack for breaking down legal jargon, Mel has honed the art of communication with corporate clients and is here today to share her best tips with us. Mel, thank you so much for joining me on Hearsay. |
00:02:13 | MS: | Thank you, David. And what a fabulous intro. |
00:02:17 | DT: | Yeah. Well, it’s all written down here in front of me. |
00:02:19 | MS: | I love it. The kind of lawyer that businesses can’t live without. Can I trademark that please? |
00:02:25 | DT: | Yeah. Well, not if I trademark it first. |
00:02:27 | MS: | Noted. |
00:02:27 | DT: | Well, yeah, we’ll have to have that dispute after the show but before we get into our topic for today, communication with corporate clients, which I think is so important, we’ve all gone through that journey of coming out of uni, writing essays, writing problem questions, lots of big block quotes from a Lord Justice from 200 years ago to getting into business writing but before we get into that, tell us a little bit about how you ended up at Pax8 as the head of legal and your journey from private practice to in-house. |
00:02:53 | MS: | Alright. I started my legal life as many of us do in a large national firm here in Brisbane, and I had some time in Sydney. I rotated as a graduate through three different work streams, classic rotation and I settled in the corporate advisory mergers and acquisitions group. And I distinctly remember at that time, though I was very junior, I wanted to place myself there because at the time I could see that it would set me up for the best chance at working in-house within a business environment. And that was the mythology of the time and I don’t subscribe to that entirely now but this was 12, 13 years ago. And I was right. I’ve got access to go on a client secondment and I learned exactly what in-house would be having one client focusing exactly on their problems, deep diving into the industry but also getting a breadth of knowledge across lots of different subjects, which was the complete opposite to my experience in private practice. So that truly solidified my thinking. I was hooked. I came back to the firm and to the billable hour and I missed the in-house environment, however, I wanted to still do another year or so to just solidify the training that I was getting and also take on some of my own study outside of hours. So I committed with my own time and my own money, and it was a little bit secret squirrel on the weekends, to do a certificate of applied practice, in-house practice with the College of Law – and they still offer that today and it goes all the way up to like a Graduate Diploma and a Masters. And I thought that’s going to give me a great sense of practice in-house because it’s an entirely different skill set and it’s also going to show a future employer that I’m committed and I’m ready to be the best junior legal counsel I can be. Then I started getting ready for the roles. Now, in Brisbane. At the time, there weren’t that many junior legal counsel roles. They would come up once every three, four, six months – mining, there was plenty, otherwise, not as much. So I connected with the recruiters that seemed to have those roles. I was patient. I was strategic. And then I landed a job at Brisbane Airport Corporation. That was my first in-house role. I cut my teeth across everything you could possibly imagine. It’s a city council out there for all intents and purposes. There’s sewerage, water, land, leasing of every type, from a small shop all the way up to incredibly large industrial. There’s waste management. There’s obviously commercial airline agreements. There’s an incredible amount of consumer and competition law. The entire concept of the airport by itself can be a bit of a monopoly. Airport parking as a business model is a very interesting topic and maintaining government relations was a big part of that role. I was so lucky because I was the junior on the team surrounded by many, many senior lawyers. So I would shadow a lot of them and I was a sponge, truly. So I was there for four years. Came to the end of my time and I realised that what I was missing was experience in this looming privacy, GDPR started to be the new thing and I wasn’t getting access to it. There wasn’t a huge amount of that work and the work that did come in around IT, data protection was really going to a subject matter expert within the team. So I started to think about what might be next. And again, I put my feelers out. I was patient. I did a lot of manifestation, I can get a bit woo woo and big picture thinking, writing down – what would my next dream job look like? And I wrote down things like “tech startup, ASX listed, based in Brisbane but global, really cool, really fun, just a different vibe to an airport corporation.” And six months later, that’s what came along. So I joined Megaport as employee 56, just post IPO on the Australian stock exchange. The share price was $1.58 or something, and it was truly a startup. I went from what you could consider a large steam ship of a tanker boat that’s steady, stays the course and to move direction needs to be thought out and very much conscious of risk because it’s an airport. I went from that environment to a jet ski where it was like, “let’s go over here, over there. Boom, boom, boom! We’re going to go to this country. We’re expanding over there. We’re going to the U S now.” Incredible environment to grow and to learn the list of company experience as well and really in the tech space at that time, and probably still too today, money just being thrown in the system and money to spend. Incredible rockiness that even increased through COVID. All of our jobs were secure and I was able to spend money on implementing contract life cycle management tools. We were first, not first at all in Australia but, one of those first to market to really deep dive and talk about our experience using a tool like that. And I learned so much about project management outside of legal skills and I was also growing as a lawyer and then as a leader and then I started to get my own team, the end of my time at Megaport, which was seven years all up, the company was in 20 something countries and I had helped do all of that. Japan launch, France launch – they were big ones, plenty of European countries and then the start of working on Brazil, which has now launched and I’m outside looking in going “good for you guys. You got it done. That was awesome to see.” And again, I was looking for the next thing. I was ready to put my money where my mouth was and step up and be the leader of a legal department. I had plenty of opinions. Just ask me. I was always talking about what I would do, and “this is what I would do. And this is what I think,” and it’s easy, cheap shots from the side, right? But I was keen to get in the arena and see how I could do in a greenfields role. So again, I went to the drawing board and I sat down, big vision thinking, and I started to strategically analyse who I would need to be to get an opportunity and who I would need to speak to, to understand what opportunities were around and again, so in love with Brisbane and just the biggest fan of the city. I didn’t grow up here but it is home now. And I wanted to stay here but also again, very happy to travel and be part of a global environment. Tech and B2B tech seems to be the niche I’m in for now. And so I thought let’s stick with that because I don’t want to change everything up if I’m changing up my leadership responsibilities. So I’m going to stick with the industry I know and I’m going to shift my responsibilities because doing a new industry and being a Head of Legal felt like maybe a bit too much to chew. I would probably figure it out but as it’s turned out, it was the exact right thing. Then comes along Pax8. Now they dropped into my DMs on LinkedIn, a talent acquisition gentleman by the name of Chris, who’s just down there actually. And he’s “just dropping the DMs, Mel. We’re looking for our first greenfields lawyer in the region. We’re a US based company. We’ve been in business for 12 years. We launched in EMEA four years ago. We’ve been in APAC for two years. We’re in seven countries here now. Brisbane is head office because the regional managing director has family here and wanted to really settle here and bring really cool tech jobs to Brisbane” – which is just an awesome vision that I’m here for – and yeah, “we need our first lawyer. We’re spending a lot externally. We think we can probably now make the jump to bringing someone in-house. What do you think?” And at the time I was like, “oh, okay. I don’t know this company. I’ve never heard of it. What is this?” I had a lot of stuff going on in my personal life. It just wasn’t the right time. So I just thought, “no, not for now. Let’s just keep it on ice,” but the right things for you won’t pass you. And Chris came back into my DMs a few months later. He’s like, “hey, we’re still looking. Do you want to have a call?” Now, you’ll have to just take my word for this but eight is my lucky number. And so I took the call because I hadn’t heard of Pax8 but I figured it was a sign. So I took the call. I learned more about the company and then we went through the process and along the way of interviewing, which was quite extensive. I learned more. I was learning about them. They were learning about me. It was very much a mutual, like, “I don’t know if this is going to work. Let’s just see for both of us.” And for the first time in my career, I actually felt like I had some balance of power. I actually had some power to come to the negotiation table as someone who is bringing a very specific skill set that not a lot of people have just because of the nature of my experience and that was very empowering. So we went through that process and then I signed the contract in February this year and then I said to them, “by the way, I’m exhausted from seven years of startup, scale up life. Could I please have three months before I start because I want to go to Bali and chill out my nervous system.?” And they said, “yes. That’s okay. We’ve waited two years for a lawyer. We’re happy to wait another three months.” And thank goodness I asked because it was the best thing to reset. I started in the May. In my second week, I was off to the Philippines to meet the team there. Since then from May until we’re speaking December 2024, I’ve been all over the world and connected with many of the 1800 people in the organisation. And coming from – Megaport was 300 and something, Brisbane airport was a 500 law firm – I can’t quite recall but the Brisbane office was a couple of hundred – So this is a huge step up for me to understand US tech corporate dynamics as well in quite a large business. It’s an entirely different kettle of fish to navigate. So that’s the story. I’ve been here for seven months now, passed the probation. We’re all happy with each other – phew – and it’s time to get to work. I’m building something from scratch and it is so energising and I love it. I’m learning a lot. I’m learning so much, not about my legal skills so much as my strategic skills, being in a room of people where I’m there, not so much as a lawyer but as a leader, taking off my lawyer hat and putting on my strategy hat is a struggle. I have to deliberately do it instead of when we’re brainstorming. For the next few years, I come in with my lawyer hat and I’m no good to the team. I’m going to say things like, “well, what about this? Be careful of that. We have to think about this.” And when we’re doing that blue sky thinking, you can’t solve and ideate and get into the problem solving, even though my brain wants to go there, you need to let that natural process go. And then legal by design would teach us that being there early is absolutely amazing and I can influence and guide, maybe, let’s just think a little bit about launching in this country for these reasons versus this country for these other reasons but allowing that brainstorming and that vision work to happen and then coming in later with legal, that for me has been such an interesting dynamic. So that’s the long and the short of it. |
00:14:15 | DT: | I can tell that you’ve got your own podcast because you’re such a storyteller. Right? |
00:14:21 | MS: | It’s in the name! Storey by name, story by nature! |
00:14:24 | DT: | Your experience kind of draws out a few communication topics, right? So we have this career path as a lawyer in private practice, that’s this expert spiral, right, where you become an expert in a given area, right from the beginning, you said you did your graduate rotations, you immediately start developing expertise in one of those from one year out. And then you get ever more expert in that so long as you sort of remain in private practice in a large firm, the kind you’re describing, obviously, boutique firms and generalist firms, it can be a very different experience but you tend to learn how to communicate with other experts on that path, right? And then when you end up in your General Counsel role, when you move from that expert career path to your generalist career path, I imagine it was a real shock to the system, a kind of adjustment that you would have to make to go from, “well, here’s the narrow focus, the narrow lens through which I view the challenges that come in. Now I’ve got to be thinking about every possible facet of legal issues that might arise for this business but through the lens of just one client.” You’re almost changing the settings in two ways. You’re thinking about a really narrow set of problems for many businesses and many clients. Now you’re thinking about many problems from a legal perspective but just for one business, just for one client, it would have been a real adjustment to make. And then I suppose the organisations you’ve worked in, you’ve experienced across both, you know, as you said, the jet ski, the startup, the small team. At the same time, an ASX listed entity. So you’ve got that dynamism and chaos, a little bit of a startup environment – and there’s a lot of startups hiring their first sole in-house legal counsel at the moment – all the way through to an international business where you’re part of a pretty complex machine, and you really need to understand how that machine works in order to communicate inside it. So a really interesting career path that you’ve been on but one that I imagine has taught you a lot about talking about the law to different people in the business. |
00:16:20 | MS: | Totally. That’s exactly right. And it’s a skill set of its own, and it is not something that is taught in law school, and it is not something that is taught particularly well in private practice. It doesn’t necessarily need to be. However, I do think that the associates, the senior associates, etc, that really start to understand this and speak to their client where their client is at is the exact skills that I’m deploying but they’re going to build better rapport and probably get a better book of business to be able to move into partnership. That’s my prediction. The ones that I work with at that level, at the moment, across lots of different firms, across lots of different countries, the ones that I can see that are trying to think about fit for purpose communication are most likely the ones that will move up in leadership rather than into an individual contributor role. |
00:17:14 | DT: | Yeah. And do you think part of that, that we don’t teach business communication, practical communication of legal concepts very well in private practice is because in the large firms that you and I started our careers in, contact with the client, whether in writing or in person, tends to be something that happens a bit later in your career, you’re often not directly exposed to the client. I mean, you were very fortunate to do a secondment. You also moved in-house relatively early. You were looking for those junior legal counsel roles but many people might not have that experience until they are a senior associate until they’ve been practicing for a few years and at that time you’ve developed a lot of habits around the way you talk at work and the way you communicate about the law. Do you think you were really fortunate to go in-house a little bit earlier, both in terms of your secondment and in terms of taking the leap a little earlier and having that opportunity to learn from those mentors outside of private practice? |
00:18:08 | MS: | Yeah, that’s exactly right. And at the time it was a little bit frowned upon, I’m not going to lie. There was an air of, “ooh, what’s Mel doing? That’s a bit junior. Ooh, she might be making a mistake. Ooh, she can always come back.” It’s like when you exit a cult. And they’re like, “what are you doing? You’re not following the rules”. And there was an interesting dynamic there when I look back and I had a HR person pull me aside in part of the exit interview process, and it was very patronising. It was, “you can always come back, there, there little girl, If you’ve made the wrong choice,” and I’m here thinking “I won’t burn bridges. And thank you so much. We may very well work together when I make this switch and this firm may become a client because I’ve got great relations. So I don’t want to be a stranger. Don’t get me wrong but I’m not going to take career advice from somebody that hasn’t done the thing that I want to do.” And I don’t mean to be nasty about that but why would you, you have to look at those that are doing what you want and ask them. You cannot be what you cannot see. And sometimes we don’t even know what is out there until we see it. And for me, I see my, I reflect to have had a skill of being able to visualise it rather than see it externally, because there weren’t that many examples of women legal leaders doing things the way that I wanted to do it. And so I had to become something that I couldn’t really see in one person but that I could see elements of across lots of different people. I reflect on that time and it’s quite lovely to look back because I’m so proud of myself for pushing forward, despite the sense of “what’s she doing?” And when you have conviction and courage, those traits can set you off on a path that is so remarkable and it is brave to step out of the mould and it is hard but the truth was that I could have absolutely always come back. Of course I could have. And I would have maybe brought a client with me. “Hey, Mel wants to come back to private practice but she’s coming from Brisbane airport and they’re about to launch a new runway project, $2 billion worth of legal fees. Let’s take her.” Like I would have had a bag with me coming back and juniors don’t think they have that power but they absolutely do. The money speaks, the connection speaks, and you may not be able to make the decision on what panel firm that we’ll be using but I know for a fact that I influenced decisions based on my experience and insight of certain practice groups when my General Counsel was asking for detail to select the panel. So I’m getting off track. I want to bring it back to communication but because I went in early, despite reservation of others who may or may not have had my best intentions at heart. Maybe they were just salty they were losing a resource, I don’t know but, in any event, I was free to leave my employment. I did and I was able to get in early and hone my skills early. I’m more masterful now because I’ve been doing it for 10 or 11 years. That’s the only difference. And it’s just practice like any skill, it’s the sets and the reps, it’s like going to the gym and picking up the barbell day in and day out. So when I came firstly, I didn’t have bad habits. I wasn’t set in my ways, what I would say to more senior lawyers, and this goes for any lawyer of any ilk and level, not just commercial: you have to constantly uncondition yourself from the ways of working that no longer serve because the rate of change in the profession, the way that we all communicate with each other and the tools that are now available. I’m talking about large language models. I’m talking about AI, I’m talking about even thinking about presenting your advice in the form of a PowerPoint presentation or a graph or a visual – instead of just blocks of texts that, I can tell you now, business people will not read that. Thinking is a constant evolution that we should be challenging ourselves off no matter how experienced we are. So coming in early, not having the habits helped observing what worked and being a sponge with the more senior people and just practicing my own style. And then coming into the tech world entirely different again, because software engineers speak a different language. It’s code. It’s “don’t come to me with the solution. It’s come to me with the problem and I’ll find a solution myself.” And, as an example, when I was working with software engineers, many times I would come and say things like, “okay, we’ve got some open source code that we need to protect. Here are some of the ways that we absolutely have to protect what we’re putting out. There’s an API. We need to know who’s connecting to our network for a number of different control reasons. This is the problem I have and here’s why.” And they would come back to me and go, “okay, here’s how we think we’re going to solve it. Boom, boom, boom.” And I’d be like, “I’m not a subject matter expert but you’ve nailed it for me. So thank you very much.” It’s a very humbling experience coming in-house because you’re not the smartest person in the room anymore. In private practice, you’re surrounded by brilliant lawyers who are the best of the best in high school and the smartest at university and they were able to get a job in the profession, which is increasingly more competitive and difficult. So therefore they were more savvy and maybe well connected and just really intelligent people. And you’re used to that environment and you think you’re the moneymaker, you’re bringing the money and you’re the lawyer. You come into in-house and you’ve got to work really hard. People have different ideas about what it means to be a lawyer. |
00:23:26 | DT: | Yeah. You’re the Department of No. |
00:23:28 | MS: | If you play it wrong, you will be the handbrake, the Department of No. And that’s the good reason a lot of my colleagues operate that way because they haven’t yet made the mindset shift to understand that they’re there to facilitate business. They’re there to facilitate good business. They’re there to facilitate ethical business that never forgets that our duties to the court and to the rule of law come first and then the duty to our employer comes second. That’s the bargain. That’s what it is and the employers understand that, or they should and if those two things are ever in conflict, well, I have to resign. I have to, or I risk being on the front page of the AFR coming out the back-end of a banking scandal or a casino scandal and you know, these are real examples because I got too conflicted. I lost my way. I didn’t have the right ethical guidance. I’ve seen it. It happens to really good lawyers and really good people who don’t keep close to the fundamental rule of being a professional lawyer, the corporate comes second. So coming in and balancing all of that, it’s not for everyone. It takes a high level of emotional intelligence, a high level of being able to connect with people and build rapport. I am friendly with everyone here but I’m friends with no one and that’s a very hard boundary that is isolating. I’m the only lawyer out here. The rest of my team are in the US and over in Europe and I come to these rooms and I’m friendly and I’m sitting in these tables with my senior leadership team but I might have to be across the room saying goodbye to them for whatever reason six months from now. I don’t want to necessarily know the ins and outs of their personal life. It’s not going to make my life easier if there’s a redundancy coming and I also know that someone over here has a sick parent. That’s tough. I’ve been in that position when we went through reduction in force at Megaport, which is public. That was a tough time because I didn’t have those boundaries in place. I was more junior in my career and they were friends and colleagues and others in the corporate world can get away with that. You can blur those lines a little but as you get more senior, it’s tough. It’s really tough. It’s not for everyone, David. I tell you what, there’s a lot of mythology around in-house maybe being easier or maybe for lawyers that couldn’t hack it in private practice and of course, there is certainly some way of practice everywhere that is ‘easier’, in inverted commas, in terms of work life integration, in terms of the demands of your client. There’s no doubt about that but there are still ways to really work hard if you want to. |
00:26:10 | DT: | Yeah. And a different kind, I suppose, because I think we so often think about productivity in private practice as “you’re a revenue center,” right? So what do you bill? What contribution do you make to the top line? |
00:26:22 | MS: | Totally. |
00:26:22 | DT: | In a general counsel role, it’s a little more nuanced than that, right? So it’s not as quantitatively measurable but absolutely measurable. I want to ask you about the step before learning to communicate with your client, whether you’re in-house or a private practitioner learning to communicate with a new client and I do this as well. You know, I advise a lot of SMEs, a lot of startups. I think the first thing you have to do is really understand the business they’re in and the industry they’re in but you can’t know everything about every business and every industry off the top of your head. When you’ve come into your new roles, whether that was at Megaport, at Pax8, how did you get started understanding the business? How did you start to understand their industry with their business priorities, their goals, the unspoken stuff that existed in the office? |
00:27:11 | MS: | There’s a lot of reading and there’s a lot of asking questions. I have now practiced in financial services, airport infrastructure, cloud computing, network as a service and software distribution. Entirely different. And I ask a lot of questions each time. I almost want to walk around with a little learner badge on like I’m a car. “I’m new here. I’m a learner” and it takes at least 6 to 12 months truly because each has their own acronyms and their own style and their own way of speaking and each has their own nuances and so asking the questions and just truly not being afraid. And I’ve done this in rooms of very senior people. I have just, as an example, the other day, it was “VPP is this over this, over this.” And I said, “oh, sorry, what’s VPP?” “Oh, vendor per partner.” “Oh, thank you.” And then they kept going. And that was crucial for me to understand the context. Otherwise, I was going to sit there not being able to add anything whatsoever. And I don’t know if I did add any value to be honest but at least I understood what was being talked about and I was taking those notes. So good businesses will have an acronym soup, they call it sometimes, acronym dictionary. We call it our ‘Paxonomy’. You come to the new business and you get read in and everybody needs to do this, irrespective of being in legal or accounting or even in software or marketing, whatever it might be. We’ve all come from different spaces and so you need to be read-in to the new language of the new environment and that takes time. And the other piece is the reading. In this day and age there’s no excuse because you can read the annual reports. You can read books. You can listen to podcasts. You can deep dive on industry trends. I get serious about asking my colleagues what newsletters they subscribe to. So then I will get into the ecosystem of the thought leaders in the network as a service space. When I was in Megaport, I followed a guy called Christian Koch, who I believe is still creating. He’s a network engineer and is deeply ingrained in the ecosystem. He’s the influencer of that world. He’s one of them. And I would follow along. I didn’t understand it all but you get the pattern recognition. You learn the names of the biggest data centers and you learn the players and who’s this and who’s that and it’s all just context and learning. So being humble, coming as a learner, admitting you’re a beginner, it’s very normal. People will always be happy to teach you and advise. And I always make it a case of reaching out to my key stakeholders anyway, when I start in a new business, to have a coffee, to have a one on one, to catch up online if they’re overseas. Half an hour to say hello, introduce myself. Ask them about their business. Ask them about what’s concerning them. What are their goals? What are their KPIs for the year? What are their metrics? What are the competitive concerns that they have? What technology is on the horizon that they’re interested in? Honestly, the podcast skills come in handy because I interview in a way. I ask so many questions and I use it as an opportunity to let them speak. And I love to speak, as you can tell but giving them a chance. |
00:30:22 | DT: | But I like what you say about how it’s really about asking a lot of questions. I think there’s an unreality to sometimes the advice that you get, especially in private practice, I remember 10, 12 years ago in private practice, there was a real focus in a lot of large law firms around structuring the practice areas around industry rather than around the areas of law in which you practiced. And really specialising in an industry but there was this unreality of, well, learn to speak the language of that industry by just learning it yourself, like reading trade publications and stuff and you could always tell. You’d experienced it in the law as someone who didn’t actually have any experience with real lawyers trying to speak like one you’d immediately be like, “oh, imposter,’ right? Like, and so I think, Being the most curious person in the room and not always assuming you have to be the smartest person in the room is a real benefit to learning about industry and I think clients always respond well to genuine interest and curiosity about what they do rather than assuming, “well, I already know everything about what you do.” |
00:31:25 | MS: | 100%. And it goes to building rapport, being authentic and a bit vulnerable in your admission of not knowing is highly crucial to building trust within new relationships. It just is. Brené Brown talks about this. There’s a lot of understanding in a scientific space now about the power of being authentic and being vulnerable doesn’t mean crying and breaking down and explaining all of your trauma from childhood. ‘Vulnerable’ is just lifting the mask a little and peeking out and just going, “hi, yeah, I’m a bit new here. I’m a little confused. Would you mind just breaking it down for me?” I know that I’m a relatively intelligent person. I don’t know. I’m never the brightest. Certainly didn’t get the GPA, I was way too busy being on every committee under the sun and partying but I know I’m not, if you put us in a line, I’m up there. And so if I don’t understand a concept, it might be because it hasn’t been explained very well and then I’ll ask for clarification. If it’s still unclear to me, then it might be that the person explaining it also doesn’t know it entirely well that they can break it down for a beginner. And so then you start to get into a conversation where you’re learning together and you make it safe for another person to show the limits of their understanding and this is the crucial piece of communication for the business because then you know where they’re at and then you can meet them where they’re at. |
00:32:53 | DT: | Yeah. Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more with that. And the learning piece is really about preparing yourself to ask the questions, right? Like to be inquisitive in the right way. The other preparatory step, I guess, other than learning about the industry or the business in which your client operates is building trust and, even in-house, it takes a while to build that trust and you’ve described just now that there are limits to that, that you want to keep at appropriate distance as well, that there’s so many cautionary tales that we can find from media reports of people who’ve certainly built a lot of trust with their corporate clients but that’s been at the cost of their independence. |
00:33:32 | MS: | It’s clouded. That’s right. It’s tough. |
00:33:35 | DT: | We’ve talked about how you develop that knowledge, that insider perspective, but how do you develop trust with a client? |
00:33:44 | MS: | Absolutely takes time – and it’s about being consistent. It’s about doing what you said you would do. If you say you’re going to have an advice back to them by close of business Thursday, you have that advice back to them, or you come to them proactively and give them the heads up that your week has been an absolute chaotic mess and it will be Friday. Is that okay? It’s communication. It’s the simple penance of being in a relationship with anybody in our world, personal or professional. It’s treating others how you would like to be treated. It’s empathy. It’s putting yourself in their shoes. It’s thinking, “I know that the board meeting is coming up. That means that they’re probably a little stressed at the moment. Maybe I should check in and see if there’s anything I can do and take it off their plate.” That’s being a good co-worker. That’s being a thoughtful member of a team. That’s not stretching yourself and going too far so that you burn out trying to fix all of the world’s problems and trust me, I’ve learned that the hard way – responsible oldest daughter here, guilty. It’s a balance again that you learn with experience but it’s the same as it is at home, at work, at sport, at school, in life, treating others, how you’d like to be treated, communicating, learning how people like to be communicated with and to, and respecting that. My CEO here loves a good WhatsApp and doesn’t love a good Teams message. And if I need to get some quick instruction, I’m going to use that channel. What I’m also going to do is protect myself and get it back into a formal corporate environment and respond via email “as discussed offline, blah, blah, blah, blah. Please see advice below and attached,” etc. So there’s a balance there about connecting with people literally where they’re at. And this person travels a lot. So I have to be flexible – and getting things in writing as well. So I’ve touched on that. And then another piece just to follow on is we often get what I call drive-bys or fly-by-nights where our most frequent flyers in the business, the ones that we work with the most, which is often a sales team, will just come on by and they’ll drop in at your desk. And this is the best thing about in-house. You cannot get away from your client. You are literally there amongst them. You’re not up in a beautiful tower on Eagle Street in Brisbane, or I don’t know where you’d be George Street or what? |
00:36:12 | DT: | That’s the one. Yep. |
00:36:14 | MS: | I can’t even remember… or that really nice one down with Governor Phillip, I can’t remember… but down there you can’t get away from the client. You can’t screen their calls and deal with them, email. They are literally in your face in the lunchroom and they will not remember that they have a question until they see you. So what I’ll get often is, “oh, Mel, I’ve been meaning to ask about this email that has to go, you know, blah, blah, blah. Should we think about this?” I’m like, “oh my gosh, I just need a coffee but good morning to you.” Have the conversation, flesh it out, be engaged. And then absolutely get them to follow it up and use the internal system. I will always say, “would you mind dropping that into a service now ticket for me” – which is the internal system we use – or, “hey just flip me an email when you get back to your desk. So it doesn’t get off my radar and then we’ll work it through.” So being prepared to take instructions in any which way that they will come in the social settings of the workplace or a drive by at your desk when you’re busy doing something else and you need to manage the interruption irritation – it’s another skill as well. I always get things in writing for a number of reasons that are very obvious but also not so obvious. I need to have data to show my Chief Legal Officer in the US how often I’m being utilised and by who. I can’t do that unless I have the data in the system. So if I give all of this beautiful advice all the time to people that’s just not counted, she’s on the other side of the world, she might just think I’m twiddling my thumbs. When I come and ask the budget for a junior resource to help me with all of this overflow work, you’ve got to come with the data. So getting all of that into the system is crucial, even if it’s email and you haven’t got an internal system just yet, which I know a lot of departments are still working through. |
00:38:03 | DT: | You know what I’m finding really refreshing about this conversation, Mel? I think when a lot of people talk about the move in-house, they talk about it exclusively in the kind of you’re there to enable and facilitate business, you’ve got to get closer to the business, you’ve got to get a bit less risk averse, all of which is true, right, but they don’t talk about the barriers and the lines that you do leave in place. I think that’s often missed in a lot of conversations about the transition from private practice to in-house. And I like that you’re very open about that, that these barriers and lines, they’re there for a reason because often you hear about people who make the move in-house, who are very excited about it. |
00:38:41 | MS: | They’re not billing their time anymore. It’s freeing! |
00:38:46 | DT: | Yeah, that’s right. |
00:38:46 | MS: | It takes a while to uncondition yourself in that way too, can I just tell you? you do a great meeting and you’re like, “oh, that’s an hour of billable time. Yes. What code do I put it to? Oh, there is no code. What? It’s all billable. Okay?” It warped my mind and I was only in private practice for three years. So I can’t imagine how it would feel if you had been there for longer. |
00:39:08 | DT: | Yeah, absolutely. |
00:39:10 | MS: | I’m glad you find that refreshing. Thank you. It’s incumbent upon me as a leader in this part of the profession to be honest about it, because a lot of people are exhausted by a traditional practice. They want what they see to be an escape. They look to other ways of practice, whether that’s in government, not-for-profit, in-house, whatever it might be, fractional general counsel, as you mentioned and these are all wonderful ways of practice but it has to come from a place of self-awareness first. You need to know what your strengths and weaknesses are and how you’re going to thrive and in what environment. If you take me out of a B2B tech startup kind of vibe and put me into a highly regulated industry like banking, maybe fintech, something around health. Oh my gosh, like, I just don’t know how I would go because the pace that I’m used to and the personality types, it just suits me, my style of communication and being colourful and a little bit just quirky and “odd but that’s our lawyer. We love her,” like that’s just me showing up authentically and finding a space where I can be me. If you take me to a more conservative environment, like I know how to read the room and I’m not going to be ridiculous and actually I do know from my lived experience when I was in more conservative environments, it doesn’t allow me to just flourish and show up truly as myself. And that takes time to develop as we grow as humans into our career of figuring out who we are as well but just because you’re exhausted, you cannot stand the thought of the billable hour for another year, you’re not on the path to partner or they’re dangling the carrot as they do, or there’s golden handcuffs or whatever, does not mean that you’re going to thrive working in an in-house environment because it is very different. And I don’t think that we do ourselves any justice by pretending that we’ve got it all sorted out and we’re amazing because we don’t have to bill our time and we just have one client and blah, blah, blah and whatever the perks are, there are still a significant number of challenges and that is the case for every style of practice and every style of industry. There is no right or wrong. It’s all about what’s right for you. And so understanding what’s out there is the first piece and that we don’t do a very good job in this profession of preparing our younger people to understand the true breadth of practice. They don’t even know you can practice in-house until they’re in private practice and they hear about a thing called a secondment. They’re like, “what!?” Which is why I started my Instagram page in the first place back in 2019 because I wanted to shine a light on this space that I was loving but I do think the more that I speak on this topic, the more I want to be balanced about it. |
00:41:59 | DT: | Yeah, absolutely. I think in terms of those misconceptions, even we’ve been saying one of the benefits of going in-house is you’ve got one client but you have a bunch of them actually, right? Because it’s one organisation but, even in a small organisation, it’s made up of a lot of different people, it’s made up of a lot of different departments and they are really different, right? Like you’ve worked in technology businesses, software businesses, so I imagine you’ve got product, engineering, sales, marketing, HR, and all of them have their own professional backgrounds, their own values that come from their professional backgrounds and their experience, their own jargon. It’s one thing to tailor the way you communicate for the business and for practicality and tailor it to the strategy but then you’ve got to do that again for each separate organisation. If you’re describing a product issue to the sales team and how they could talk about it with their own customers, it’s completely different to how you’re talking about it to the software engineers who are implementing some change, right? So tell me a little bit about how you manage that. |
00:42:59 | MS: | It’s a learned skill. I did a short workshop on influencing and persuasion skills earlier in my career. It was fantastic. I learned a lot but the thing that really stuck with me was that you have to really think about your audience, who you’re communicating to, what their style is, how their brain works, and how they’re wired to receive communication, and then work backwards from there. So, generally speaking, highly general, you’re going to find a quadrant of people that are visual, and these are going to be people that enjoy a PowerPoint presentation and they’re often a business development, sales, marketing, big picture. Then of course, you’ve got your accountants, treasury, your finance, obviously it’s Excel and it’s numbers – that’s their language – which I hate but I’m very much trying to understand the language of always understanding what the numbers are, because the numbers are actually the language of the business. Truly they are. So presenting information in a quantifiable, “here’s what the numbers mean. Here’s what I’m asking for. Here’s what it’s going to cost. Here’s what I think we can save.” And then we have the written, which is where the lawyers are very comfortable. And most business people are. HR, marketing as well but you have to get away from block text. And if you’re not using bullet points as a minimum, you’re doing it all wrong. You have to use it. And I often use a TL;DR, which we call ‘too long, didn’t read’ and I’ll often put that as a sentence or two up the front, like a tweet for my higher executive, the CEO on the move between all of the different countries in the region. “Too long, didn’t read: new system coming out tomorrow, or whatever, training plan can be found here,” and then the detail. And if it’s block text, I’m not doing it right. There’s just no excuse. The only time I would block text, I don’t even know if I would but when I would allow it is when I’ve got external advice from counsel or from whoever it might be on a particularly crunchy issue that needs to go to the board and it does need to go in whole because it’s just so nuanced and they need to understand it but you best believe I’m popping a summary on the front to help warm them up and pointing out key places and pieces of the advice. And that’s just good practice as a lawyer to make sure that you’re showing that the due diligence or the research has been done correctly. So the block text, there’s no way. So you’re thinking about your industry, you’re thinking about your department and your client within, and then you’re thinking about the level. I’m often working with entry level people and all the way up to executive and then the board. It’s everywhere in between and people, not so much in tech but when I was at the airport, you have professional workers in an office and also operational workers who are out on the runway in the workshop, you go to do a toolbox talk about a safety issue, and you’ve got to communicate differently there as well. It’s about having empathy. I always come back to that – meeting people where they are and being humble in your approach to not have to feel the need to show up and feed your ego to be the smartest lawyer in the room that no one really understands. That’s not the way that you win the hearts and minds. You show up as yourself and you explain it to people where they’re at so that they can understand it without feeling like you’re talking down to them or you’re patronising or you’re in some way overcomplicating it. So that they feel confused and then they don’t get the message and then there’s risk. So you’ve completely avoided fixing the problem and maybe created a new problem. If I come into the workplace and talk about psychological safety, which is a new piece that comes out of Fair Work and Workplace Health and Safety changes just across the board. We’re finding Australia’s leading the charge but this concept is coming up in different ways around the world. The concept of being able to be safe at work from harm and not just in a high risk physical environment but in an environment that’s more of a mental knowledge worker environment, which we’re more used to. If I come to that and talk about psychological safety and use big words and fancy this and that, and refer to this section of this Act, there’s no way that that lands. So we haven’t actually talked about what it means for this business and what proactive steps we’ll be taking and what you should do if you have concerns and breaking it down because at the end of the day, it is actually just about people feeling safe in the environment that they work in but if we puff it up with fancy words, we lose the entire audience, the entire meaning, and then the risk is still there. So you haven’t done your job. |
00:47:40 | DT: | Yeah, absolutely. I suppose sometimes you’ve also got a conflict between those two audiences, right, or those multiple audiences in the sense that We’ll take your example just now, right, of describing a work health and safety issue for the business, right? You have to describe that in a plain and understandable way. As you said, you can’t puff that up in a way that’s not going to give it the respect or the comprehension that it deserves but at the same time, you might have a few different teams listening to that talk, that one briefing, and maybe the engineering team is a little bit sceptical about all this stuff. Maybe they think it’s all a lot of nonsense but the finance and HR team, they’re more receptive to what you’re saying. So there’s actually a conflict between the receptivity or the right kind of messaging within the business. So how do you manage that? |
00:48:25 | MS: | I think you think about the audience in terms of segments, you take a marketing and a branding and a PR approach, and you deliver the message multiple times and that means more work but that’s the job. And you do have to absolutely present it to the board with a tone that is very different because they need to understand that they actually now have duties, proactive duties, around creating a workplace that is just up to scratch by modern standards. And we’re all learning what that means anyway. We are building the plane as we fly it as a society and as a community. It’s a fascinating time to be doing this and implementing it in a new business, while I think the broader population is also trying to find its feet on what is the right balance between caring but also getting on with the job that you’re being paid to do and it’s a balance like all things and political parties will have a different view and different industries and different conservative, progressive managers will have a different view. So finding that middle ground, that’s fair, that’s ethical, that’s moral, that’s right by law but also beyond that, we are, as the in-house counsel, the best place to help guide the business to find that sweet spot but you do find conflict. There’s no doubt about it and another example would be a very classic commercial negotiation: Sales team are just pushing so hard to get this deal across the line for the end of the quarter because it’s going to hit the numbers, they’re going to meet their numbers, they want their commission in before Christmas and they are solely motivated. Unfortunately, we might be working with a potential customer that is just asking far too much risk for what they’re paying us. And so I have to look at that, talk to the sales leader and say, “hey, I know we want this deal. It’s a great brand, however, they’re also asking for unlimited liability cap” or “they’re also asking for some very out of step market position on a termination right.” Now, do you want to give that to them because then it means that they can terminate for convenience at any time. That’s going to mess up your numbers maybe a year from now, or do you want to take the hit now and move this into the next quarter so that we’re not being rushed by this faux urgency and constantly having that and then we’ve got the finance team saying a number of things, depending on the risk, “bring it in. We need the cash now, we’ll sort it out later.” And then we’ve got the risk or maybe the privacy team, information security team, if they’re asking for penetration test rights or whatever which is just a no, no. We’ve got to weigh all of these things up. So the role again of the in-house lawyer is as mediator. And it’s a privilege to come into this environment and bring together highly intelligent people in their world, get them around the table or around the email or around the Slack message, whatever it is. And just try to help navigate a way through, because I don’t actually care, me personally, I’m not invested in whether this deal is done today or tomorrow for the quarter. It needs to be done in a way that is sustainable for the business. The sales team need to be able to thrive. Otherwise, I don’t have a job. They’re the ones that bring in the money and keep the lights on but a sales mentality can also get you an environment where longer term, there just may not be a business at all because you’ve made promises you can’t deliver on and then you’re getting sued or whatever it is. So it’s a constant balance of risk and reward, cost and benefit constantly. The dynamics are shifting depending on the business appetite, the understanding of the bigger factors, maybe things that I don’t necessarily know about in terms of M&A activity or the business trying to get a balance sheet in a certain way because the annual report is going out soon and there are numbers to be hit for the market. It’s often so much bigger than even what the people within the business know about. And so having that connection up as well, and then trying to influence in a way that doesn’t give away insider information is also incredibly difficult. And the CEO, a really good CEO will step in there and really help guide but I try very much not to escalate those things until we’re a really crucial yes or no decision. Take it to the CEO in a way that is in its final form so that they can make that call and that’s really what they’re paid to do but we can mediate along the way. |
00:52:58 | DT: | Yeah, absolutely. And what you’re describing there also touches on, and we’ve talked about this a couple of times already now, which is urgency. I suppose what you’re describing in your story just now is actually what the advice is based on the urgency, right? Which I think you’re right in identifying is not an appropriate influence, right? Like you don’t want to give a different answer based on how much time pressure there is, you know, the answer is the answer and I guess sometimes that’s your role, right, as the moral compass of the business, as the priest of the secular religion of the rule of law is to say, “well, I know it’s unpopular but I do have to say these things. We owe responsibilities to our customers, to our stakeholders to slow down and think about this.” On the other hand, there are also those situations where maybe there’s no roadblock or impediment but there is a need to have some legal output or process done quickly. Maybe there’s a need to get your advice done quickly. And you touched on this earlier in terms of communicating in the way that clients want to be communicated with – dot points, slide decks – I’m a big fan of slide decks for advice for corporate clients, especially communicating in Slack or WhatsApp – but not missing the nuance there. Now, in that situation, communicating the way the client wants to be communicated with, you’re truncating your advice because that’s the way it’s going to be received well, right? That’s the way that it’s going to be heard and understood but you can always have that more complete advice for the record and to show that it’s all been considered and create that audit trail. If it’s being informed by time pressure and your example about the sales team coming to you with, “hey, just one quick thing” on a Friday afternoon is one I hear about all the time. You’re not even going to have the opportunity to provide that fulsome advice, right? You’re stuck with the dot points or the WhatsApp message. The other one that I hear about, and I myself am exposed to a bit of advising startup businesses, is that issue that comes up just before the board meeting and there’s 15 minutes to, you know, get the board up to speed on what they really need to know about. So how do you navigate that situation? What do you choose to leave on the cutting room floor? What do you do about following up that advice later? Can you even qualify that advice later after you’ve given it and they’ve acted on it? What are some of the challenges there? |
00:55:14 | MS: | You do have to have boundaries in place and communicate early and often with your stakeholders how they engage with you and the bare minimum time that is required so that you avoid the last minute, “I’m about to go on leave and this is urgent because I’m not going to be here.” That’s not good enough. If I have a set service level commitment to the business that is published and reported on, the business knows that you will receive your response within say three business days for this type of matter, 24 hours for a more simple review of something. Having those guardrails and communicating them does help weed out all behaviour where your colleague is not coming to the party and treating others how they would like to be treated because they left it in their inbox and now it’s urgent. There’s that beautiful saying that “your lack of prior planning is not my emergency.” |
00:56:11 | DT: | Yeah. |
00:56:11 | MS: | That is a really good one and it’s really true. However, of course, you have to pick your battles. Sometimes it is more genuinely urgent. And let’s use this sparingly because we are not saving lives. I’ve got friends that are first responders. When they talk about their day, I mean, that is urgent. |
00:56:31 | DT: | It really puts things into perspective. |
00:56:33 | MS: | It does. Yes, shareholder value is important. Yes, the capitalist agenda, all of it, it keeps me in a job and I get to pay my bills. However, this is not brain surgery and this is not life saving medical advice. So we have to keep our perspective, and I’ve had to say that – gosh, she almost had a conniption, years ago, a wonderful project manager who I loved working with was in such a flurry about getting a signature from one of the directors who had just headed out to lunch, and she was honestly just in such a state that I thought, “don’t have a heart attack or anything. Like, please, it’s okay.” |
00:57:10 | DT: | At the end of the day. |
00:57:11 | MS: | Oh my gosh and I just took a moment and this is where we put counsel in the word legal counsel, to be honest. I just looked at her human to human and just went, “hey, hey, take a breath. Wow. Just, hey, like let’s get a room.” And we took to a meeting room and I just – “pause, let me get you some water. You’re very worked up. Have a breath. This is genuinely not urgent. He will be back in an hour and we will get the signature.” And I said to her, “no one’s dying.” And her face was like completely shocked because she was a smart person who knew that but of course, when you’re in that fight or flight mode and you’re hyper aroused and your nervous system is buzzing, you just get taken over – amygdala hijack, it’s a real thing, I see it often – and being that voice of reason, being calm, being able to just settle the room is very powerful and I’ve seen some exceptional leaders do this quietly, confident, “just pause. Let’s take a beat.” If there were more people in rooms over the years that had helped everyone just take a moment, we may have avoided all kinds of incredibly disastrous global financial crises or who knows, we don’t know but this goes to diversity in the boardroom because when you get a diverse group of people beyond gender – gender, age, background, experience, all of the things – you will often hopefully create an environment that is just a little bit more relaxed and the equilibrium is different. I’ve noticed that compared to when I go into rooms with all my, like the tech bros it’s a very different vibe. So, that’s just human nature. That’s just human nature. And sometimes coming in – and this is the role I’m playing at the moment, I’m the only woman on my senior team. That’s changing and it wasn’t always that way but I am for now and it’s a very wonderful group of people. They’re great to work with but I do play a role, whether I like it or not, of like a bit of a big sister who’s like, “hey, let’s just chill for a bit. Let’s just take a moment. What are we really trying to achieve here?” And that’s leadership. That’s being able to see beyond the current emergency of the day and to keep that perspective and it’s a balance again. I keep saying balance but it’s all a balance and it changes often. |
00:59:36 | DT: | And for a lot of our listeners, they’re not in-house, right? They’re in private practice but all of this stuff that we’re talking about, it’s still applicable. |
00:59:41 | MS: | It’s still the same. Totally. Humans are humans. |
00:59:45 | DT: | But you’ve got a slightly different conflicting priority, I guess, in the sense that when you’re in-house, your conflicting priority is, “well, I want to keep my job. I want to stand on my boss’s good side. I want that promotion. These are the people I work with every day, and so I want them to like me, and I want to have good relationships at work.” For our private practice lawyers who are dealing with exactly the same pressures, for whom communicating with trust and knowledge and confidence and relevance is just as important but their conflicting priority is, “well, I don’t want to lose this client,” right? There’s 89,000 other lawyers in the country that they could go and see so I don’t want to lose them to a competitor. I’ve got to tell them what they want to hear. |
01:00:26 | MS: | Oof, totally. This is why we’re a profession. This is why we put ourselves out there as having higher duties. That’s the difference. We have to accept the commercial realities of some of the situations we find ourselves in and that they may be detrimental to us because we have the first duty to the court and to justice and to fairness and to the correct rule of law. And if I give advice, as an example, I’ve never had to do this but if I had to give advice – I worked in FMCG, a fast moving consumer goods, a factory we operated was not up to scratch for the purposes of modern slavery – for whatever reason, it was poor. The people weren’t being paid well, and there was hazard everywhere, and it was unacceptable on many levels. And my advice was that we shut it down, or we invest more money to get it up to scratch for various reasons. And then the advice is not followed because of course, that’s going to cost money and the bank balance is low. The balance sheet is a bit, “yeah, I don’t know. There’s not a couple of hundred thousand at the moment, Mel, to get the fire code sorted in our factory” or whatever it might be. The business has the right to go against my advice. They can do that and they might and then I have the obligations on myself that are put on me because I’ve decided to be a professional solicitor in this country that then obliged me to take action. And we’ve seen what happens when some General Counsel don’t do that. And they do get very lovely golden parachutes to sail off into the sunset. So commercially they’re not necessarily perhaps put in a situation where it was like, oh, it’s okay that now you can’t work as a lawyer anywhere cause you’re struck off and you’re somewhat disgraced for your decisions and your lack of independence but it’s fine because you’ve made some good money. You can go and enjoy. I really struggle with that. I really do and I think that we all need to be better and not make the same mistakes twice. Learn from our colleagues that have gone before us in the first tranche of modern corporate counsel in Australia, which is all really through the 2000s. I believe, and it’s not verified, I’m so happy to be proven wrong but I believe the first proper corporate counsel in Australia was one of the big four banks. And it was a General Counsel who had come from, I think, Ashurst or Allens, a partner who had come over. Now, of course, before that, the history in the US of General Counsel is longer and deeper but it took a while to get here and we’re evolving and it’s been an amazing 25 years but let’s learn from the mistakes. Let’s talk about it. Let’s communicate. Let’s keep that dialogue open with our ethics counsellors in the law societies, who are wonderful people who can advise us as well. |
01:03:11 | DT: | Yeah, absolutely. And as I said, I guess everyone has this challenge at work but it is a little easier in private practice because you’re not all in with one client, right? You know, if you have to step away from a client relationship for an ethical reason, “look, sucks that I don’t get to do that work anymore but I feel good that I can sleep at night and I’ve got other clients, right?” It’s a big call for in-house counsel to say, “well, I’ve got to resign” |
01:03:34 | MS: | You have to do your due diligence when you’re coming into a business. Yeah. You have to try and understand who you’re working with, who you’re working for. Do your own risk analysis on the shareholders, the capital structure, the influence, things that are just not passing muster to your spidey senses and everyone will have a different moral code, and navigating that and trying to pay your own bills and be a great lawyer, it’s a lot. It’s a lot. |
01:04:03 | DT: | Yeah, no, it is. We’re nearly out of time. Mel, before we go, you’ve given us some great advice, some great things to think about whether we’re in-house or in private practice and again, what’s been really refreshing for me is some of the hard truths that about this, that it’s not all, “well, just learn to speak the language of business and you’ll be right.” There’s some challenges along the way but if there’s a lesson that you’ve learned the hard way in your journey in legal practice. |
01:04:25 | MS: | There are many. |
01:04:27 | DT: | Especially when it comes to communicating with your corporate clients in the ways that we’ve described today, what’s that lesson and how has it changed the way you communicate? |
01:04:36 | MS: | Oh, I’ve got a good one. Oh, I’ve got a good one. |
01:04:38 | DT: | Ok, here we go. |
01:04:39 | MS: | Not recent but not as far away as I would like to admit. Really watch yourself at social events after a few rosés, what you might feel loose lips, think ships, truly they do and I have divulged information that was either not mine to divulge or was not the right timing to colleagues that I thought I was friends with because it was a tumultuous time and everyone was very uncertain about their jobs and who was staying and who was going and a lot was happening for context but a couple of cheeky rosés over lunch and what a lesson. So I learned that the hard way and I took full accountability and made amends where I could. Was there major harm? No, there was not. Was there a need to halt trading with the ASX? Absolutely not but as far as the standard that I hold myself to, it wasn’t good enough. And I learned that in a very deep and significant way. And for our more junior listeners coming up to the Christmas party season and New Years, and there’ll be lots of fabulous events with clients, with colleagues, having a good think about how you want to engage with alcoholic beverages is something that I think we all have to learn the hard way because we are privileged, we have information that we often don’t know others don’t have, and we assume that maybe others do as well, and then you find out that they didn’t, and you shouldn’t have mentioned it, and it’s not good enough. So yeah, that’s my lesson, and I took a big F on that. Oof. Oof. |
01:06:23 | DT: | Well, I mean, good on you for like, acknowledging that, right? I think… |
01:06:26 | MS: | What else can you do? I’m only human. I was stressed and I had some rosé and I shared something I shouldn’t have and it got back to people that it shouldn’t have and then I had a chance to explain myself and there was the correct action taken and the amends were made and we moved on |
01:06:43 | DT: | And again, that’s the sort of thing where you’re in an environment where many of your colleagues in that organisation could have made the same mistake, and it would have had a social consequence. |
01:06:50 | MS: | They do! They were doing it too! But it’s different. We hold ourselves. We are, and you can’t forget it. Be friendly with everyone and try not to be friends with anyone. It’s hard because there’s some beautiful people, wonderful humans we get to work with, not always but sometimes but that line is, it’s got to be clear. |
01:07:12 | DT: | One last question for you. We’ve got a few listeners who are students just starting out their careers in the law, maybe they’re recent graduates and we talked earlier in the episode about how a lot of this communicating with clients – you’re not necessarily exposed to it early in your career. You might be in a boutique practice, in a smaller practice, in personal services practices, young lawyers have the benefit of client contact much earlier but in large law firms, often you’re shielded from that a little bit, and I think to your detriment. Now, if there’s something that those listeners could do to start honing these skills, even in an early stage where they’re not directly communicating with clients a lot, or they don’t have the same opportunities to do that, that some of our other listeners might have, what advice would you give them? |
01:07:52 | MS: | I would say that they should look for every opportunity to go to a networking event with clients, with potential clients, or outside of the firm at a junior Chamber of Commerce or Young Lawyers Law Society event. Getting involved in the young accountants, the young engineers. Every city and larger region have these spaces where professionals will come together and network and meet. So those people will be your future clients, I guarantee it and/or maybe your future employers and connecting with them and learning and speaking and getting on LinkedIn. I’m a huge fan of LinkedIn. It’s so powerful and connecting and networking in the DMs and doing that consistently over years because that’s how relationships are built is important. Going to the firm drinks and feeling very uncomfortable because everyone’s quite senior but putting yourself out there and saying hello to one new person. Not being afraid or being afraid but doing it anyway and saying, “hello, how are you going? What are you up to this weekend? What project are you working on at the moment that’s interesting? How was the commute in?” Basic stuff just to get the ball rolling and then find out a little bit about them and ask questions. People love to talk about themselves mostly and if they’re at a networking event, the chances are pretty high that they were happy to be approached and to meet new people. So I would recommend that every day of the week. |
01:09:17 | DT: | Absolutely. Well, Mel, thank you so much for joining me today on Hearsay. |
01:09:19 | MS: | Thank you. That was fantastic. |
01:09:32 | DT: | As always, you’ve been listening to Hearsay the Legal Podcast. I’d like to thank my guest today, Mel Storey, for coming on the show. Now, if you want to learn more about the life of an in-house counsel, well, we’ve got another episode with a general counsel in our back catalogue. Check out our episode with Group General Counsel for NOVA Entertainment, Danielle Keyes. That one’s all about the ethical push and pull between working for and advising a single company but also the need to uphold your paramount duty to the court, a topic that we did touch on with Mel. This episode is episode 69 and it’s called ‘Pushing Reset: Navigating Strategic Complexities as Risk Averse In-House Lawyers’. If you’re an Australian legal professional, you can claim one continuing professional development point for listening to this episode. Whether an activity entitles you to claim a CPD unit is self assessed, as you know but we suggest this episode entitles you to claim either a professional skills point or a practice management and business skills point. For more information on claiming and tracking your points on Hearsay, please head to our website. Hearsay the Legal Podcast is brought to you by Lext, a legal technology company that makes the law easier to access and easier to practice, and that includes your CPD. Hearsay is recorded on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation and we’d like to pay our respects to Elders past and present. Finally, I’d like to ask you a favour. If you like Hearsay the Legal Podcast, please leave us a Google review. It helps other listeners to find us and that keeps us in business. Thanks for listening and I’ll see you on the next episode of Hearsay. |
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