Olivia Perks on in-house lawyers as change leaders in organisations

Episode 6: Olivia Perks on in-house lawyers as change leaders in organisations

Run time: 42:35

Voiceover: This is a Lander & Rogers podcast, bringing you fresh perspectives on the legal and business landscape and life through a legal lens.

Anthony Kearns: Welcome to Legal human, podcast focused on the role of human lawyers in the legal ecosystem and society more broadly. I'm your host, Anthony Kearns. It's my great pleasure to welcome Olivia Perks to Legal human. Olivia, thank you so much for joining us.

You are the General Counsel of University of Sydney, a role you've been in since 2006. And prior to that, you were in-house at IBM, I believe, and then in a large firm. My first question, I guess, is what have you found so engaging about the University of Sydney and tertiary education to stay so long? I mean, it's a long time to stay in a role.

Olivia Perks: So firstly, thanks for having me, Anthony. Always excited to chat to you. So yes, I've been at the university since 2006 and in the General Counsel role for the last three years. And yes, I think it's fair to say, when I started I didn't think I would necessarily stay for so long. But each year, there's new, unique challenges that emerge.

And so the role has been incredibly varied and challenging and increasingly interesting. And often when I look to other sectors and I reflect on my role and I think about other roles, I can't think of a sector that is as interesting and challenging and complex as the university sector. Interestingly, a lot of lawyers, when they join the university sector, they kind of stay in the sector for life because it's so interesting. I think a lot of that is driven by, I guess, the environment and the nature and the complexity. And so, a lot of people probably think about universities just in relation to teaching, so undergraduate teaching, and that's probably really only about 40% of what we do. But in terms of the work that arises for lawyers, it's just unbelievably diverse. And I've been really fortunate and lucky to work on just the most unbelievable range of matters. So, you know, there's the sort of work that would arise in a in a corporate environment. There's privacy, M&A, we do commercialisation, we run big international clinical trials. Then of course, there's all the human elements that arise. So a lot of issues related to students, gender-based violence is an issue that's arising. So it's just incredibly, incredibly diverse. I think some of the other factors that are challenging, particularly from the perspective of the in-house legal team, really relate to the changing nature of the university and the challenges that universities face in Australia and more broadly.

So, universities are now probably one of the most highly regulated sectors in Australia. We're subject to just a vast array of state and federal legislation, so that's a challenge. Obviously, we're subject to some of the challenges that many other organisations are facing, particularly the challenges that legal teams are facing. I think there's also, in the university environment, it's almost like a petridish of all the problems that are facing society, and the university has a really interesting role in society and I think that drives a lot of really interesting work. I think one of the other things that I've reflected on, I guess, is just the range of stakeholders that we engage in. So, there's about 10,000 staff; we have 70,000 students, which is a huge number. When I was at the University of Sydney 30 years ago, there were 25,000 students. So a massive, massive, uptake, particularly international students. There's donors, there's alumni, government, all of our research and education partners. So just this massive array. And then of course, there's all the regulators. And I think, I think the other thing, and maybe this is particularly the case for the University of Sydney, is that a lot of people feel that they are a part of the University of Sydney in a way that's very different to a normal organisation. And so they care very deeply about what we do. And so, I guess that drives a lot of media and political attention, and it can be very challenging to manage all of that. And so they're just some of the issues that contribute to the work that we have to do within the legal team.

AK: My observation is that sense of investment or participation in something important also drives your team. There's a real sense of purpose - I come to work to do important things. Although we've departed from the purely sort of publicly-owned educational system, there's a sense that we're contributing to society. So is that something that drives you?

OP: I think, you know, it's really interesting, Anthony, when we interview prospective lawyers coming into the team, the question we often ask people is why are you interested in coming to the University of Sydney? And often that's the clincher as to whether or not we actually pursue a particular opportunity, because it becomes very evident when we ask that question, what is the driver as to why someone wants to come to the University of Sydney? We do tend to attract very purpose-driven people, and I think that's why they love the work and they find it incredibly challenging and they stay. But I do, yeah, I do think we attract a certain type of person. We've been very lucky. We've got an absolutely amazing team with really, really diverse and versatile skills. What makes them stay is some of the reasons that I discussed earlier. It's just incredibly challenging and complex. And there's also, because of this changing environment and need to continually be thinking about what are the skills that we need to build on, and what do we need to, how do we need to change and evolve in order to respond to the changing environment?

AK: Which is a nice segue into the purpose of Legal human, which is thinking deliberately about the future role of human lawyers. And what I've found interesting about the sector, again, is things like technology and enabling technology and AI, are directly challenging the university in a way that other sectors are not experiencing it. It's a tool available for increasing productivity in a lot of sectors. For you, it's sort of existential, is my sense. It affects the whole educational process, the whole, what are we educating people in? So it's one of the reasons why I'm really excited to have you join Legal human, because it's something you're thinking about deliberately in the context of the university - how do we prepare the human students for the future of work when technology enablement, and AI in particular, is going to supplement or change what humans are doing?

OP: So I think there's a few aspects to that question, Anthony. I think, and it's something that we've been thinking a lot about in, and I might talk about my team and then I can talk about the university more broadly.

AK: Sorry, I jumped ahead!

OP: So within our team, we've been thinking a lot about not just AI, but about the sorts of skills and capabilities that we need in order to ensure that we're best able to support the university in what we perceive to be our purpose, which really is around, I think, the purpose of an in-house lawyer. And it's quite different to the purpose of somebody working in a law firm. It's to ensure that we're helping and supporting the university in delivering on its mission and its strategy. And as part of that, we're helping manage legal risk. But that's really what we want to be doing. So we want to be making sure that we're spending our time and effort on the work that's actually helping to deliver that goal. A couple of years ago, we spent quite a lot of time thinking about, what is our purpose, and we decided that our purpose was broader than just giving legal advice in a narrow kind of sense. And we recrafted our purpose around helping the university navigate this complexity that we discussed earlier, and really balancing risks and opportunities. So that was core to our purpose. And then we started to think about, well, in order to deliver on that purpose, what's the strategy that we need? I want to talk about the strategy because I think the strategy is really important in talking about how we develop the skills that we need for the future, because that became, when we started to think about these issues, absolutely central to the strategy of the legal team. So, it was fortunate that around the time that we were developing this strategy, we had a relatively new VC and we were developing a university strategy. And so, we started to develop our strategy thinking and being quite mindful of this purpose that we had clearly articulated, and thinking about what is our role in helping the university deliver on its own strategy. We became very clear about, well, what do we as a team want to be known for? That was kind of the things that we started thinking about. We had this aspiration, like a pretty bold aspiration that we wanted to be a next-generation in-house legal team, and what does that really mean? And then we started to think about, well, you know, what do we want people in the university to think of us? What is our value proposition, really? And we realised that we wanted to really hold on to this idea of expertise, that we provide legal expertise, but we also wanted to be known for strategic impact, and we wanted to be known as innovative and collaborative. And in terms of thinking about those three things as really our brand and our value proposition, we then started to think about, well, what is the strategy and what do we need to do to get there? And absolutely core to that was ensuring that we had a thriving culture and that we had a workforce that had the necessary skills and capabilities to deliver on that mission. And then there were some other things. We're very focused on the user experience and very focused on strategic alignment and work optimisation, but really, in order to do the last three, we had to make sure that the workforce had the capabilities and skills.

So we started to think very deeply about, well, what are those skills and capabilities in order to ensure that we can get here? And we spent a lot of time developing a learning and development roadmap and really thinking about what, you know, what do we need to have in here? Initially, we started to think about, well, what's the mind shift change? What are the attributes that we need? And I personally felt that some of the most important attributes and the mind shifts that we needed within the team were, we wanted everyone to be very curious. And I know people often talk about curiosity, but in my mind that wasn't enough. It's fine to sort of say, we need to ask lots of questions and understand, but I personally feel what often happens is that lawyers ask those questions and understand, and they don't do much with it because they're so busy and they're so caught up in managing just the day to day. And so I felt that it was important that we were able to be very versatile and adaptive and be able to really lean in and lead change. Because you can ask all the questions, and then who's actually going to do something about it? And I think that in-house lawyers in particular, and this is different to law firm lawyers, the in-house lawyers in particular are really uniquely placed when you look at all the various different professional service functions across any organisation. We see everything. We see all the problems, all the issues, literally everything that goes wrong. And so, if you're thinking carefully and joining all the dots and really kind of like, you know, sort of pulling yourself away from the day to day and sort of constantly reflecting, you're in a really unique opportunity to start thinking about, what are all the problems and where do we need to actually be spending our time?

And so it's really kind of a movement from being more what I would say, sort of a traditional passive kind of response, to being a lot more proactive and assertive about the work that you do, and then spending time thinking about, how do you craft those boundaries around the work that you do so that you can actually be focused on those priorities? So I think it's a mind shift around being willing to be versatile and adapt, and constantly adapt and change, feedback loops. I'm constantly writing lists about, what are the top things I need to think about, what are our top ten strategic projects? And we reflect on it and change it every month. So, it's being versatile.

I think the other thing that is absolutely paramount is, is you need to be a relationship builder. That is just absolutely critical. I think they're the two things that I would sort of put at the top. And then I think there's all these skills that you need to develop, so like quite specific skills. When we developed our learning and development roadmap we started to think about, what are all those skills that you need? And a lot of them are, you know, related to innovation. They're related to legal design. So this is an area where we've spent a lot of time and effort, and this is really applying design thinking skills to the law. And we had enormous success, and it's something that's really gained a lot of traction within our team, is these legal design skills.

So these skills are kind of multidisciplinary. You know, you need a bit of creativity. You need all the traditional skills that lawyers have that we talk about all the time, like critical thinking skills, problem solving skills. So I think they're really important. And then the other things that I would say, I think, in terms of the human element is, coming back to this strategic question around what's the work to be done, is this capacity to what I call strategic triage, which is constantly looking at the work coming in. Are we doing the most important work? Who's best placed to do that work? Is it the legal team or are we better placed automating? And this is when you then interface with technology and think about other ways of doing work. And then there's this concept that I call the handoff, which is - I think what happens with legal teams is, particularly in-house, and particularly if they are well respected and doing a good job, your workload just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So, and then there's this pressure to do more with less, but you're constantly just being asked to do more and more and more, particularly if you're good. And often, and I have a particular bugbear about this, you end up doing other people's jobs for them. So I think what's important is that you come in almost like a mini sort of legal management consultant, diagnose the issues, and then you work out what's the best way to resolve those issues, and how can innovation and all these tools that are evolving and emerging, how can they help you do that?

And then sometimes it involves saying, well, we've done this piece, we've taken it this far, it's not for us anymore. We need to hand it off. We need to embed those roles and functions into an operational unit, and actually do the second step and hand it off. I don't think we're very good at that, and even I feel that that's something we need to continue to do, is to actually then hand it off. Because once it becomes operationalised, and the work's boring anyway, and somebody else is probably better placed to do it. So, I think there's so much work for lawyers to do. And I see all the tech as the enablement and helping piece in a positive way. So, I know there's a lot to unpack in all of that.

AK: Well, there is. I mean, you've pretty much jumped right to the end. How did your team - I sort of know the answer to this, but - you seem to be challenging the very nature of what a lawyer is, you know, what's their role. How did your team - you took over as general counsel three years ago, and you've just recently won Legal Team of the Tear, Association of Corporate Counsel. Congratulations. How did they respond when you first started, when you first proposed this to them?

OP: So I think what was interesting for me is, I had been really fortunate a number of years ago to do an MBA at the University, and it was incredible. I learned so much, I learned all these new skills, and I came in with this quite bold ambition about what I wanted to do. And I must admit, the first few months I felt that everyone was on board, and then I realised at some point that maybe they weren't as on board as I thought they might be. So it's definitely been a journey. But what I think was really critical was this piece that I mentioned earlier around defining the purpose and the strategy, and then embedding that strategy in everything that we do in order to get everyone on board. So I think that took about two years to really, and, you know, Anthony, because you were involved in some of these discussions about getting the leadership team on board in terms of our purpose and strategy, and then once they really got it, it just exploded. And I feel that now, every conversation that we have is around what are our goals, linked to our strategy, and the strategy is very much focused on developing ourselves as well. It's very focused on reflection, dialogue, it's very focused on understanding our clients, constantly getting feedback from our clients. And that can be a bit confronting sometimes, but the more you do it, the more you get used to it and you sort of, you know, if people give negative feedback, it's fine. Let's just move on, take it on board, it's like a gift, and keep going. But I do think that it was a bit of a journey, and I do think that it required some mind shift changes in addition to developing all those skills.

AK: Because it strikes me that some of the mindset changes you were talking about were required to even get this done within the function. To what extent are you now sort of recruiting for people with that orientation? OP: So we did things that were sort of almost accidental, I have to be honest. They were sort of experiments, where we brought in people that didn't actually have what you would say is just traditional legal skills into the function, on secondment. And some of them were just part-time secondments, so we brought in somebody from our Vice Chancellor's office who had communications skills, and we realised, gosh that was really helpful, we learned so much. Then we developed a project that we called Fast Track Contracts, which is a document automation project. We brought in somebody from the Faculty of Engineering to help us do the coding. We brought in someone who actually had a law degree but had finance and strategy experience. And we brought in someone with data analytics experience. And it has been unbelievable how much we have learnt from bringing these people in and embedding them within our team. And then just the additional capacity to deliver on some of these strategic objectives and major projects has been phenomenal. I mean, it's tricky and it can be challenging in an in-house environment to get budget for these sorts of roles, but what we've found is we just experimented and piloted a few different opportunities, and now our clients are actually asking for us, and people want to come in and help us. And then what's great is they then go back to the business and they talk very positively about you, and they understand better how you work. So traditionally in in-house teams, you've had lawyers getting seconded out. But we've sort of flipped it and had people getting seconded in. I actually think it's the best thing that we've done because it's accelerated our learning, and it's made us realise that there's all these incredibly valuable skills that we didn't have that we need. So it was almost like an eye opener.

We did one thing, actually, that was an experiment that was just incredibly interesting is that as part of really focusing on the user experience and how we deliver our advice, we decided to hire two students that are university students, and one of them has an art background, a creative background, and we call them Legal Design Interns. And basically what they help us do, is present our information in a way that's really easy to digest. So they use PowerPoint and other tools, and they make everything look fantastic. And it's amazing the difference that makes because, you know, we were already doing 95% of the thinking, and that additional 5% of the polish where our clients receive it, and there's diagrams and they really understand it, now, the lawyers don't have time or haven't necessarily had the experience to create amazing PowerPoint packs, but the rest of the business - and this is the same in any organisation - they want PowerPoints. They don't want long memos. And I think that's a skill we need to continue to develop. We need to be thinking about, how do we present information in a way that is easy to digest? But it's been a really interesting experiment bringing in those multidisciplinary skills and having people that can create and package up our advice in a way that's very easy to understand is incredibly powerful. So their skills - I mean, I think all lawyers now need to be able to work very ably with PowerPoint. I think that's just what we need to do in-house.

AK: How did you prepare the ground for that? I mean, as listeners know and as you know, I talk about the profession from a place of love. But we're not the most inclusive bunch. And we have language like "lawyer", "non-lawyer", and there's a resistance to sort of assimilating some of this diversity of input that's cultural. And how did you sort of navigate that? Because these people sound like they've become very valuable, important members of your team, valued for their contribution in the same way as the lawyers are. So, what challenges did you face in doing that, or what was your role in preparing the ground for that?

OP: So I think the culture piece has been incredibly important. I did this really great subject as part of my MBA, and it was the subject on innovation, and it was all about people, actually. It wasn't about tech; it was all about people. But it was all about how you bring people together in a way, in order to create the conditions for innovation. So you need to have the right processes and systems, and then there's the relational aspect as well. And so I really learned a lot. And to be honest, I kind of just applied this playbook that I learnt, and it worked. So some of the key elements to it really in terms of this creating the conditions, are really changing our mindset around how we work. I think a lot of lawyers, we often like to draft something and spend ages on it and perfect it before we share it with anybody. And then when someone criticises it, you know, if you've spent hours on something, you think it's perfect and someone criticises it, you feel this sense of sort of distress or something. It's quite confronting. So we kind of started to move away and sort of create this sense of ease around, well, it doesn't have to be perfect. Why don't we just share an 80%, something that's 80%, and get feedback and just constantly get feedback. And so if you've spent less time on something and it's 80%, and you share it with a couple of trusted stakeholders for feedback and they say it's rubbish or that it's not that great, well, you haven't stayed up all night and spent all this time, you haven't invested in it. So there was just a few things that we did where we started to just say things like, we're just learning by doing. So, the first year of our strategy, we had this kind of tag for everything called learning by doing, and we just said everything was an experiment and a pilot. And then it kind of took away this idea that you've failed and that what you've done isn't any good, because lawyers don't really like that feeling. And I personally didn't really like that feeling. One of the things that - so this learning by doing, one of the things that we actually did, which I think was a bit confronting initially, was we had all these goals and innovation projects, and then we had some awards at the end of the year around, you know, who'd been the most innovative team. And the team that won was actually the team that said, well, our project failed because we thought we had this great idea and we went to the client and they said, "well, we don't want to develop a whole other system, we're already doing all of these steps. It's a complete waste of time. Wouldn't it be better for you to work with our system?" What was interesting is that they failed pretty fast, and then they kind of iterated and went back to the drawing board, and then they learnt all these insights and they changed what they were doing. And I think it was just this whole idea that, it's really a rapidly evolving, changing environment that we're working in, in all professions but particularly the legal profession, and that's okay. And we need to just consider individually and collectively what our strengths and capabilities are, collaborate together, and work together and just have a go. And so we did a lot of things that were okay, and then some of the things that we sort of thought were just sort of secondary ideas became bold and really great ideas.

So there were a few things that kind of evolved from all of that. But we did spend quite a lot of time talking to lots of other people, exploring ideas and just this whole concept of learning by doing, which was quite powerful. We've now moved beyond that, and we then sort of went into this phase where we were talking about partnering for impact, and that's where we then continued to experiment with some of these ideas with our stakeholder clients. And now we've got to the phase where we've had some success, which has been really exciting. And now we're thinking about, well, how do we scale that for impact? How do we scale some of these innovations for impact? But look, to be honest, Anthony, it's a bit of a learning journey and I feel that we've still got a long way to go. And we're trying, and we're trying to do things differently. But it's constantly changing and evolving, and we constantly need to just sort of be reflecting and thinking about what we're doing. So I guess the only other thing I'd say is that, as part of that whole piece, I think this reflection piece has been really, really critical. So this is this idea of just building in to the work that we do, just constant reflection, very, very purposeful, constant reflection. So every time we have a meeting, we sort of talk about some of the projects we've worked on, even if it's just a quick conversation - this went well, that didn't go well, why didn't that go well? This has happened, this is the changing environment, what do we need to do? So it becomes kind of like a muscle that you have to exercise all the time. And I just don't think that we were really exercising that muscle before. We weren't reflecting enough and adapting enough. And this comes back to what I said earlier around what I think are the key attributes, and I think it's being adaptive and versatile. And in order to do that, you have to just keep reflecting, getting feedback, and constantly evolving. But it's a lot of work. It's tough, and it requires a lot of time. So it's not easy. It's easier just to continue to work the traditional way and just say, I'll just accept instructions and work in a reactive way. But ultimately that's pretty boring, and it's not the most interesting work. I think you then get stuck to doing pretty low… you could ultimately get stuck doing pretty low-value work, I think.

AK: Going back to where you started, and you describe the just the technical complexity or the complexity of the University from a legal perspective. The majority of the conversation so far has been on something other than that. It's been on the function, it's relationship with the organisation, the relational complexity of the organisation. I mean, is there a risk that you just become busier? I think going back to this key skill of working out what is your role, because you've got a highly conscientious population, right? So they tend to take stuff on, and you're describing what I would consider to be a sort of leadership role. I know you've taken leadership on things like AI itself for the University. You've taken leadership on, across the sector and the profession, on contract automation. You're leading the profession in many respects. And then there's all this other, there's the gig, right? There's the keeping the lights on from a legal perspective in the organisation.

OP: I agree, I sort of see it…

AK: Is it sustainable?

OP: It's tricky. It's almost like two tracks. It's like, the doing the BAU, the work that comes in, and then the second track is constantly thinking about what's the work that needs to be done, improving, thinking about the future. So it's like, it's like these two tracks and sometimes you more in one track, and sometimes you're more in the other, individually and collectively as a team. But it is tricky. And, you know, the more work that you do and the more value that you add, the more people want involved. I think it is like a serious challenge. This issue around the more work and doing more with less as well, and this sustainability point is our biggest challenge. And so, I think it comes back to a couple of points. It's this whole kind of volume trap piece and this whole idea around work optimisation. And that's a real focus for us this year, because I do worry about the legal team, they work incredibly hard and it does need to be sustainable. So I think that we need to be thinking about, well, what's the stuff that we don't need to be doing anymore? And we've used some really good tools to think about triage. We talk a lot about strategic triage, which is really, some of the tools, and we've got a four quadrants framework which you're familiar with that we use. But I think we need to do more work, and we need to give our lawyers confidence to turn away low-value work. But there needs to be structures, and there needs to be clear direction around how you do that. And then, of course, there needs to be a bit of flexibility because, you know, things come up and change. But it is a really, really tricky question, I think. I think for all in-house lawyers, that's one of the most pressing and difficult issues, is how you manage just the volume of work and think about, what's the work that you should be working on. I find it incredibly challenging, incredibly challenging.

AK: Particularly when you consider that most, a lot of lawyers, when we go back to what is the perception of role, what's the key assumptions about the role of the lawyer, baked into that is things like responsiveness and high conscientiousness. And you're recruiting, you've got a relatively homogeneous population around conscientiousness in particular. To what extent do they need to be protected from themselves? I don't mean to sort of infantilise them, but you need to go upstream and address the workflows using authority? Or is that something that you sort of avoid?

OP: No, I think there's a bit of both. So I think that, I think this whole issue around workload, I do think that we have more opportunity to address these boundaries than we think. Right? So these boundaries are set by a whole range of things. They're set by policies, they're set by the competence of your client, they're set by your own feeling of self-worth. So I do think that there does need to be some structure around some of that, particularly in specific instances. So I can think of an issue that we're working on this week where there's been a big stream of work that one of our lawyers has been working on, which has arisen as a consequence of ongoing regulatory change. Now, we handed off some of that work to the business, but the business, I think it's probably fair to say, hasn't still necessarily developed the skills and capability. So they are constantly calling this lawyer all the time. Now, the issue I have with that is, that that work's hidden. No one sees that work, and she is meant to be working on other work, and she's constantly doing this work. So what we decided to do was we've developed a specific request-for-legal-services tool specifically for that workflow, so that we can track it, so that we can say and she can demonstrate the actual time that she's spending on it, so that we've then got tools to go back to the business and say, we've been tracking the work in this area, and this is what we're doing and is it appropriate for us to continue to do that work? But without that data, it's very difficult to have that conversation. So, I do think data dexterity and understanding data and being mindful that the data is a really important part of that equation, because if you don't have the data, it's very difficult to go back and say, well, this lawyer has been spending 80% of their time taking calls, because there's no evidence. And everybody in the business wants evidence to reflect work, it's necessary for business cases. So I personally am not of the view that you need to have a tool or a tracking intake for everything, but I do think that there are situations where it's incredibly useful and powerful in order to sometimes protect the lawyers from themselves. They need it because, as you say Anthony, lawyers quite like that role of helping people. We do. We actually like it, even if it's to our own detriment. We don't like people thinking that we haven't helped them. We just don't like it. And so, it can be difficult for a lawyer to do that without some of that structure, is my personal view.

AK: You've talked a lot about the role of lawyers. I'm interested in how you now perceive the role of your leadership team, and how has that changed? Because if you're expecting them to be somewhere between the lawyer you've just described who is receiving all this work from the business and doing it, and the way you're talking, which is largely sort of operationally, strategically focused, what's their role and how has that changed since you took over?

OP: So it's changed a lot. And I was talking to another general counsel about this yesterday, actually. I think the best way to describe it is that initially when I came into the role, the structure was the general counsel, and then there were about six or seven directors, all with individual expertise in specific areas. So property, commercial, IP, workplace relations, etc. And I think that those directors were very much seeing their role as managing people within those specific teams, and they did a very good job at that. But the shift that we needed was for those directors to see themselves as leaders within the whole Office of General Counsel function. And so that was a mind shift change around, well, my role is not just managing, supervising and distributing work within my domain. It's actually thinking about, what's the work that the portfolio should be doing? What's my role in leading the function? What's my role in ensuring that our team has the skills and experience necessary? What's my role in strategic triage? All these different areas. And so, as we started to make that shift, I think we became acutely aware of the fact that we needed to develop a more fulsome capability framework for our team that really described in more detail what our expectations are in relation to each of those functions and aligned with our strategy. And so last year, one of the lawyers in my team led a piece of work that was quite difficult, actually, because we went out and looked to sort of see, what's everybody else doing in relation to this? Particularly thinking about it from the perspective of the future needs of tomorrow's lawyers in-house. And we couldn't find anything that was helpful. So we ended up drafting something from scratch. It took a lot of time and energy and thought, but I think it was an incredibly important piece of work. So what we ended up developing was a capability and progression framework, where we've effectively categorised lawyers, more junior lawyers and intermediate lawyers, leads and then directors. And then we've very clearly articulated what the capabilities and behaviour expectations are within each of those. And we've also articulated, what are the behaviours or things that you should be doing if you want to move up? Because we want to provide a platform where people feel that they can see a career, and that we're training and developing people for the future, so that we're effectively developing our future leaders. So that required quite a lot of energy and thought around, well, what are the capabilities? What do we need? And then how do we continue to develop these capabilities? So it was a huge amount of work that is incredibly important and worthwhile piece of work, because we've ended up, and we've only just launched it in November last year, and we launched it and we kept wanting to sort of fiddle with it and perfect it, but we launched it and we said, look, we're just going to see how we go for a year and see if it works for us. And I think individually, the directors found it very helpful in articulating what they need to spend their time on, and their roles really are not just managing people, but about some of these things that I mentioned earlier, around creating the conditions for innovation, ensuring that our teams are spending time on the right things, influencing our stakeholders, thinking about the whole ecosystem in the system that we're working in, considering the external factors, collaborating and partnering. So all these other things that are a lot of additional work, but are the things that are really important if we want to deliver on our strategy and purpose. So I think it's been a bit of a journey and we'll have to see how we go with it. But the feedback we got from the lawyers was that it was incredibly useful to them in understanding and articulating what our expectations are of them, because they're different and evolving. It's not just about, you're an expert in the workplace relations team, and, you know, you give advice in relation to those issues. It's around all these other things that we've been talking about and taking ownership at certain levels as appropriate in terms of contributing to the strategy, ultimately in service of the mission and purpose of the university, so that it's all kind of aligned. But it's been a long journey. So that's been three years, and we've still got a lot of work to do. So I think it's, it's not like a, you know, a quick, quick win sprint, that's for sure.

AK: So it doesn't end.

OP: No, it doesn't end. I think it doesn't end. Yeah.

AK: It is the gig. It's the work. And I then start to think about the sustainability of your practice. Because presumably you're in meetings from time to time where you're asked to provide legal advice on a really critical issue for the University. I mean, what level of knowledge do you need across this incredible portfolio of complexity, complex legal issues?

OP: Well, to be honest, Anthony, I feel like a generalist now. Like an expert generalist. You become an expert in in various topics on a week by week basis, and then you move on to something else. So I think it's really looking at the whole system. You know, you really need to be listening, reading the media, understanding what's going on. And in the university sector there's a lot of politics. Last year we had a lot going on. You know, listeners would be aware of the debate on the international student caps. And we were in a really difficult predicament where we didn't know what our funding sources and the amount of our funding was going to be, in December, it was incredibly tricky. And you need to be across all of that. You know, we've got a very, sort of, there's been this big reform and review of the education sector. So there's a lot of reforms that are coming out of that. We've got a new student Ombudsman. And so those new things coming in, we need to be constantly thinking about, well, what does that mean for us? We're probably going to need to think about, you know, how we manage some of these different types of complaints that are becoming, you know, are we resourced to do that? So that's something that impacts my team, but obviously it impacts the University. But it's around saying, well, these are the changes and these are the things that we need to start thinking about as a consequence. So it's pretty challenging, but it's the challenge is what I think makes it really interesting. Sometimes I feel quite exhausted, but I think a lot of in-house lawyers feel like that. And then other days it's quite exhilarating in the sense that there's so much going on and there's so many opportunities for in-house lawyers, I think, to really have quite considerable impact and really help lead the change. And so I think that's the exciting part. I think there's more up than down, I think.

AK: As so often in this podcast, you've answered the last question, I think along the way, which is how optimistic are you for the continuing role of human lawyers in the legal ecosystem?

OP: Well, I'm incredibly optimistic. However, I think that there's a lot of work to be done, and I think that we need to be very purposeful in thinking about how we manage and lead, particularly general counsels, our teams. I think we need to be thinking with an eye on the future and thinking about, where's everything going? Because unless we're purposeful about thinking about the skills that we need and the future, I think it's going to be very difficult to manage. And it isn't sustainable. I'm really optimistic, but it's incredibly challenging, and I do think that there's a lot to be done. And I do think we need to be thinking about that. I mean, the other thing that's interesting, working at a university obviously, is thinking about the full lifecycle, right? So it's not just… and we've got a new Dean of Law starting, and kind of looking forward to having a chat to her about what I think about the needs of lawyers, because I think that this needs to be embedded in the full lifecycle. These skills need to be incorporated in undergraduate degrees, masters, exec ed, and then within the workforce we need to be continuing that learning cycle. So I do think there needs to be a bit of a shift and I think everybody needs to be quite conscious of the fact that things are changing very rapidly and we need to all get on board, particularly those that are leading functions. Because everyone knows how difficult it is to recruit people with the skills and talent that we need. And so, I think we have a collective responsibility to be developing people, because people move and take on opportunities in other organisations, but I think we need to collaborate and collectively work together to develop the talent of our lawyers for the future of the profession as well, I think. I mean, I see it as one of my most important roles as a leader, and I think everybody needs to do that. It's hard, though, to find the time.

AK: Olivia Perks, thank you so much for joining Legal human. It's been a pleasure talking to you.

OP: Thanks, Anthony.

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