Private Practice vs. In-House with Mel Scott of Megaport

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Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of our show. With me today is Mel Scott, the senior legal counsel at megaport, a global technology company founded in Australia. She's worked in house for eight years across multiple industries such as aviation infrastructure, financial services and now climate cloud computing. Mel has received numerous awards for her work. She's also a vocal advocate for all things in house and shares career insights for law students and graduates on Instagram and TikTok under the handle heinhouselawyer. Mel has served as a member of the Queensland Law Society's In House Committee and as the in House advisor to the Women's Women Lawyers Association, Queensland. She's also a founding board member of the center for Legal Innovations Emerging Leaders Advisory Board. Mel is a self described recovering perfectionist who believes in progress, not perfection. And I love that motto. Mel, we're going to come back to that and chat about it. She launched her Passion Project Council, a self made podcast about in house lawyer life during the 2020 COVID 19 lockdown and the podcast now reaches an audience in over 25 countries and has been downloaded more than 100,000 times. That is incredible. Thank you for being with us here. Mel, welcome.

Thank you. So excited to be chatting with you.

You as well. So you might be the first podcast host that I've had on as a guest. Which do you think is easier, being a host or a guest?

Oh gosh, that's a great question. I like both. I think that you have to prepare a lot more on the front end if you're maybe a guest, but on the back end as the host. The editing and the post production piece is are hugely underrated and under underestimated, at least by my experience. I had no idea what would go into actually finalizing the product and then getting it out into the world.

It's true. Although I have to say that I think it's easier to be a guest than a host because I have to prepare as the host to think about what we're going to talk about and get the bio. And as a guest I just show up.

Fair enough. Well, I had to think about what pearls I was going to wear today, so it was important to me that I put my pearls on and glo off. Of course, I don't know. Not in the habit of wearing gloves. It's actually summer in Australia so it's just not a thing for us. But I do have my my favorite lucky pearls there.

Oh, I see them. The coin pearls. I know them well. Well, I'd love to hear a little bit about your podcast. Maybe we can start there. What kind of guests do you have on it? What topics do you discuss? And I guess it's been on since 2020. So what, a couple years now?

Yeah, for sure. So the idea for me behind starting the podcast was, you know, a couple, a couple of factors. Number one, I just love the medium, I'm obsessed with storytelling and I myself just love consuming audio content and I was just curious about how you make a podcast and I would, I just wanted to know the mechanics behind doing that. So then naturally for me, the topic of what would my podcast be about. To me it made sense to be something that was going to help me connect with people in the, in the profession and to connect with like minded lawyers and, and legal professionals and to shine a light on the in house practice and our sector of the wider legal profession so that law students and early career lawyers coming through the ranks have an idea about what it is that we do. It's all about demystifying in house practice and really shining that light so that it's seen as such a viable and fantastic way to progress your leg career beyond more traditional paths.

And what got you so interested and passionate about sort of all things in the house and what does that mean to you? Is it just what's different from the law firm traditional path?

I think it is for me so much of the content that I create and put into the world is the content that I wish I had available to me at certain parts of my career and I really would have loved to be able to listen to other in house lawyers so that I knew what it was that they did and that I understood what this might look like for me if I wanted to pursue the in house path. Because I only had a vague notion of what it might be when I was in private practice and it was a little bit of a jumping in the deep end and let's just hope that this is what I think it will be for my career. Which you know, luckily it really, it really was and my, my instinct was correct. But I only otherwise had a very small taste of in house life when I was on secondment with a client of the firm. And that was the, the, the actual realized that in house was even a thing because I didn't know and it is certainly not promoted at universities and law school here in Australia. It's very traditional in the sense of the big firms, the ones with the cash accounts to sponsor all of the law school events and the mooting competitions. And so they're the Ones that the students are thinking of as high status and a place that they want to be after law school. Not necessarily that in house is an option after law school or ever. And it was, you know, within. I was still in my early years of practice when I found out about In House and I just think that there's an opportunity to just have that awareness much earlier in people's legal lives.

As someone who actually is not a lawyer, I started my legal journey at a law firm as well and then kind of made the shift in house and was so surprised to find out how different it really is. The experience, the skill set, the challenges. What about it? You know, I guess what are some of the things that you tell people about how, how different it is from, from law firms?

It truly is like a completely different career path, honestly. And I think that we're seeing that, that divide in, in skills and skill sets happening in a, in a bigger way and also earlier in a career. So of course, when we're in our private practice, private practice environment, we're focusing on lots of clients usually, but most often just one area of the law. So we're drilling down and being that subject matter expert on mergers and acquisitions and even then for certain industries only. And then within that, you might have four or five clients on the go, depending on what's happening. And then within our private practice environment, sorry, our in house practice environment, the reverse in a sense, I have to be a Jill of all trades and a master of some, and I have just the one client. So my client is my employer, which is, which is a tech company. And I get the privilege of being close to the strategy and the vision of the company. I understand the dynamics, the drivers, at a level of detail that was not available to me in private practice because of course there's only so many hours in the day and you're working with lots of different clients. So for me that's been the biggest difference. And then the skill sets required on the EQ side are different in a sense. I think there is overlap and opportunities to develop how you interact with your colleagues and that hierarchy and the dynamics of a firm not dissimilar sometimes to a corporate world, depending on where you find yourself. But being able to communicate with people from all different walks of life and all different areas of the business is fundamental. So I go out into the world in megaport land and I will come across people from the software engineering team, marketing, digital marketing, our salesforce, our customer service team, oh my gosh, accountants. Everybody makes up a corporate Environment and executives and then the board as well. And we're listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, so we also have that oversight and that investor relations piece. So the way that I communicate with a member of the board is going to be very different to the way that I communicate to someone who's asking me across the way in passing at the water cooler. It's going to be informal, it's going to be on the fly. And pivoting those communication skills is, is so fundamental. And I think the last piece is that you just cannot hide from your clients. You literally sit amongst them. So when I was in private practice, I would be somewhat removed. I'd be in a really lovely tall building in the city and it was a little harder to get to your lawyer. You could call an email, of course. And you know, I think we found that private practice lawyers are very responsive at all hours. Sometimes, maybe when they shouldn't be, but when I'm in house, I am sitting on the floor and I am amongst it and people often don't remember that they had to ask legal a question until they see me, oh, that's right, email and then you're off. So you're always being available to your client, which is fun, especially sometimes when you need to do deep work. That's when I go home, I think, and turn off slack.

So it really is night and day. And that's exactly my experience of the private practice versus the in house world. But where is the training for someone who goes in house? Where do you learn these skill sets? Is it still on the job?

The traditional thinking is that you try to find your way into a commercial law firm first for the earlier part of your career and you get that rigor and that introduction to the business of law and the practice, the attention to detail, the legal research, the writing and you really get that, those skills from that earlier stage. And then maybe look, when I was coming through, it was always at that senior associate level that that's maybe when you might be able to have a look at in house jobs. Now I hand on heart, can just say so confidently that that is not the case today. And those shifts are happening earlier and we are also seeing an increase in graduates going straight to in house teams getting that practice on the job. There are some small little providers that have popped up in the postgraduate education space and they're providing graduate diplomas focusing on in house practice. There are short courses here and there. In Australia, the College of Law has a wonderful program which is that graduate diploma of that practical skills focusing on in house practice. And I actually studied that and did that off my own, my own time and my own money when I was in private practice looking to transition in house because it was something that I thought would give me that edge and explain to me exactly what would be required. Yeah. So I do think it is still on the job and for the graduates coming through, coming straight to an in house team is a viable option. And I know that's a controversial position and I love to chat with my colleagues about it because we're still working through how the, how that might play out in years to come. But I believe it's possible when you have the right team and the right mentors and if you're often you'll find that you will get more supervision and instruction in house surrounded by senior lawyers that really care than some experiences in private practice when they are so busy and their billable targets are high and they've got multiple graduates and young associates to mentor those partners and senior associates often aren't incentivized to buddy, to mentor, to coach. They don't get billable unit discount for that necessarily. And so often they might be left to their own devices to just figure it out. So yeah, there's a little bit of, there's a little bit of time to pass before I think we see how that shakes out in terms of the best career start. But I just know so many fantastic general counsel and senior counsel that have been straight into the in house space after law school and often after having another career entirely in the commercial space that are just doing absolutely wonderful things and are not in any way disadvantaged by not having that experience. So I think it's an inflection point. But I can, I can certainly say, at least from the Australian perspective, the trend is to be hiring younger in the team and we're just seeing junior legal counsel roles left, right and centre. And when I was coming through eight years ago, they were far and few between once every six months at least there's something in that.

Yeah, interesting. I think we're seeing some of that as well in the us. Well, let's start with your background and your journey, then talk to us about how did you start your career? I assume law school, private practice and where did you go from there?

For sure I did have a pretty traditional path. Having said all of that, I was following the rules as they were at the time and US law students love to follow the rules. So if anything I was a little bit of a maverick because I jumped in house at about that Three year post admission experience or post qualification experience. And that was, that was a little scandalous. Mary, that was. Oh my goodness, what has she done? She's so junior. Oh no. And I had multiple people at the firm tell me, you know, you can always come back, you can always come back if it just. Yeah, that's true and it is, it is, it is a true point. But I just had a thought that maybe I would be okay and I wouldn't and never say never, but eight years later and I've been able to forge my path in the in house space and I'm absolutely loving this way of practice because it suits my personality and my strengths. So my first in house gig was for the Brisbane Airport Corporation. So in Australia, airports are privately owned mostly and you know, it was a fantastic way to learn almost everything that you could imagine in, in terms of the construction, property, major projects, leasing, retail leasing. You know, there was water, sewerage. It was almost like a mini state. Sorry, city council.

Yeah, yeah.

In that sense. So I would really just get exposure to such a vast array of areas of the law. The one piece that was missing was the IT and the tech space. I was at the airport for about four years and had the luxury of being mentored by so many wonderful senior lawyers. I was the only junior in the team and I just had this smorgasbord of expertise and it was, oh my gosh, truly one of those really wonderful moments you find yourself in going, wow, I get to shadow some great legal minds here and what an awesome opportunity. So I, I drew on them as much as I could. But at the end of that, that four year period, there was a piece of my knowledge that was missing a little and that was around the, the data protection, privacy was becoming a hot topic and the IT infrastructure in an airport, as you can imagine, is, it's pretty set and stable and they don't like to shift that too quickly or just because it sounds like a fun idea. That's just not how it's going to work in that environment. It's, it's a very conservative and risk, you know, there's a, there's risk there with, with playing around with the technology that, that support an airport. So I, I didn't see a lot of that work and I really wanted to round out my skills so started to put the feelers out and six months later the dream job that I manifested on paper, you know, came here and, and it was megaport. And so I, I jumped from a, what I describe as a really slow Moving steady, cruise ship and everything was regular. We had cadence and projects and things that took, you know, a very appropriate amount of time for a risk and a safety perspective. And I jumped from that to a jet Ski. And I am just on this, this tech startup, newly listed on the stock exchange and just going absolute gangbusters. I was employee number 56 and now we're at some 300 and something, you know, within the last five years. So it's, it follows a similar trajectory to Ironclad, actually. And I always find that really fun to, to follow along with the different journeys. But you know that I don't need to tell you what that experience is like, it's just, hold on, let's go. And my word, did I have to learn a lot about cloud computing and the very specific product that we sell and the information security, the cyber, oh my privacy, gdpr, ccpa, Sorry, I get the rule acronyms, we love an acronym. It's just been such a wild ride. So be careful what you wish for. But I certainly found the dynamic, fast paced alternative that I was looking to round out those skills.

And it takes a certain personality to thrive and just love that kind of speed. And like you said, just putting something in because it's fun. I mean that is what I love. You have an idea and you want to be able to just go do it.

Yeah.

So having worked now in a variety of industries, from I know you've been in financial services to aviation and infrastructure to now technology, have you noticed anything different about how different industries operate or what the culture possibly is towards? Even innovation or the speed of change?

Absolutely, yes, I certainly have. And I think that the oversight of regulation in some of the industries, such as aviation and banking and financial services, is obviously going to affect the way within which the company needs to operate and the pace that it can take on innovation and change. So there's a lot of legacy systems and processes that are just going to be more obvious than when I came to Megaport being a startup, which was basically like, well, how do we want to design this? If we get to do things with the information and the technology available to us today in a blank slate, what could it look like? The possibilities are endless. And you're often fighting against your old ways of working and your ingrained habit of this is the way that I've always done it and that's just not good enough. In a startup environment or even a scale up environment, you're always being challenged to constantly assess why we do things that way. And just because we've always done it is just not an option because it hasn't been a company that's long. The longevity of that company doesn't lend itself towards. Well, that's the way we've always done it. What, for three years? No, let's try something new. This isn't working. Everything can be, everything is a little more moldable. So there's a lot of opportunity for creativity there and inspiration can be drawn from other industries and other legal departments in high growth companies as well. And the networking piece is certainly important there so that, that you're all kind of learning together and yeah, it's been, it's been such a fun opportunity to really be a part of building that legal team in this era of legal operations and the tech development that we've seen. You know, I would have loved to have a CLM like Ironclad available to me earlier in my career, but we just, we were working with Excel spreadsheets and SharePoint and different systems and they certainly did the job. But you know, coming, coming out of the opportunity for a better way of working. Ironclad's a great example of something we've implemented and there are many others of hey, we get to design it from scratch. What's available today? Let's have a look. And now it would be non negotiable for me. I couldn't imagine not working with a CLM actually.

And what is. Were you the first lawyer in the role and do you have a team? What's the kind of structure of your organization in your current role?

I wasn't the first to know. Our general counsel, Anna Tichborne has been here for a year longer than I and together I think her and I probably really did set the foundations from the team from there. There were other lawyers involved earlier on, but Anna really cemented this is the function. I'm here for the long haul and I'm going to start building and let's go. And then I came on and it was the two of us and a paralegal for some time and now we've actually evolved into I think like a three pronged team. So we have our legal engine room which is, you know, myself and junior legal counsel and our paralegal. There's three there and then we have our legal operations stream with strategic legal projects and legal operations analysts. And then the third stream or prong is our privacy and compliance piece and there's one person in that space there. So we're a team of seven now and we all report up into the general Counsel. So the trend I really think is of course, you've got your business as usual legal work and you've got all of that, the day to day, the contract review and the things that we just are always going to be here to help with. But that's one third of our team. We have another third devoted to process improvement and efficiency and a third on compliance, particularly in that privacy and data protection space because it's critical to the business and to our customers. So I think that that's a really interesting dynamic and I love being a part of the team where we have such a multidisciplinary approach.

Yeah, that's such a fantastic model and it's such an innovative way to structure your team. With a legal ops and having technology, especially at that stage of size of company and size of department, you're hyper growing quickly, trying to scale. How did you kind of come to that realization that you needed process improvement, that you needed technology? At what point do you look around and say, you know, even though we're small, the spreadsheets aren't going to work for us for that long? Or what was your kind of aha moment of starting to look around? Or was that something that you always kind of had in you?

Oh, I think there's a bit of both. And we were always, we're always still future proofing. We're always trying to look ahead at where the company is going and the strategic vision which, you know, we're so privileged to have access to that and access and understanding of what the board and the executive are looking to achieve. And so we're always then saying, okay, well who do we need to be as team, as individuals to meet the needs of the business in 18 months or three years? It's not, it's not five years, that's too long. It's 18 months. And kind of in three years is in my mind those periods because so much happens within them. Planning for five years, it would just be out of the door.

I hear you.

You have to think again. So the future proofing is important. And then the aha moments specifically for CLM and upgrading from our, you know, it was okay. We worked with jira actually. We just tacked ourselves onto a product that our engineers were using and we created our own project to manage legal matters. But we couldn't use that JIRA to then organize the signatures and then a repository, there was just no repository. And I would have our marketing team come to us every quarter and ask for an updated list of customers that or new customers. Where they've agreed to let us use their logo in our marketing material. So it's a pretty standard and straightforward request. And I couldn't give that information to them easily because the default position in our customer contract is that they will let us use the logo. And of course, you know, a small percentage of customers will want to negotiate that out or change it, you know, with notice or whatever it might be. And I could not give them a definitive list. And that, that was bothersome to me because it really was something that was important to them. So they could then go and update the website and show slide decks that included these customers because it's an important sales tool. I think that's social proof of, well, this bank's using megaport, of course we can too. And I really just found that unacceptable. So I needed a way to pull that data from our fundamental contracts and I couldn't. And I could. I mean, it's not that I couldn't. We did it manually. It was okay, but with the scale of new customers coming on, it just wasn't going to work and it wasn't sustainable. So that was one of really, you know, a handful of questions that I couldn't answer for the business and in a, in a timely manner. And that's what really prompted us to have a look at solutions on pulling the data from the contracts. That was a key piece that was missing for us. Yeah.

And one of the things that you and I have talked about a lot in the past is, you know, you guys are a small department and you can't have a dozen tools. It doesn't make sense. And yet we all know that there's countless, countless applications and systems and tools that you can buy for a legal department these days. You've actually been able to think creatively about, you know, what, what else can you use, you know, your CLM for? What other systems that you can find other applications for to kind of stretch it out and use one thing for more, more than just one particular use case. Can you talk about your journey to kind of solve the legal intake or matter management challenge that you had?

Absolutely. So we found that, you know, we were able to use CLM to process our contracts, of course, and, and that, that was, it was exactly what we were looking for from end to end. And it had a fantastic repository and we could pull the data, but we still had this missing piece of. Okay, well, that's the contracts. But what about all of the legal advice? What about the general queries? What about, you know, the ad hoc can you interpret this or what does this say etc. And those matters still needed to be processed. And we didn't want to use two systems. We didn't want to keep using JIRA if you have a general query and Ironclad if you have a contract. So we created a workflow that was an intake for new matters that was a real, you know, a mixed bag of I don't know where to put this but I'm just going to drop it in and we put some parameters in there to route it to the appropriate person. But largely it is just that really great bucket for well, this doesn't fit anywhere else so I'm going to drop it in there and, and, and then we, we're able to advise and the best piece about it is that you don't have to have a contract attached to, to the actual workflow to create it. You, you're gonna, it is going to spit out a blank word document, although we've populated it so that it kind of has a summary there. But we don't really rely on that piece so we can just kind of turn it off almost and then we're able to process the workflow like any other workflow and then it shows on the dashboard for each lawyer or person in the team as well. So we can always see who's got a lot of different capacity issues, who's working on what at any given time and we don't have to cross reference more than one system. And that's important because the business.

The.

Business has to use so many systems. They've got Workday, they have to work with Salesforce, they want to talk to the legal team, they have Ironclad. I don't want them to then have to think, oh, but is it Ironclad or is it GRL or is it email or is it Slack? And it's just think legal, think Ironclad. That's kind of my message to the team in the wider of business. That's, that's our slogan because if you just get to there, we will filter it through, you'll answer some questions and you'll be, you'll find your way to the right person to help you.

Yeah, I remember when you first told me this, I thought it was so interesting because I know when I was at Google and we saw Ironclad for the first time, we had some of our technical project managers looking at Ironcloud and they said, well, why don't we just use this for all legal intake? Why is it, you know, why would we Just use this for contracts. And it was kind of that aha moment of. Yeah, it actually makes good sense. You don't need to train your end users to go think, do I need to go request help here or do I need to go request help through this other channel? You're taking that away from them. And they're already sort of used to requesting stuff through your clm, so I love that. And it also has the knowledge management component of it and it's documenting all the metrics. Right. So for all that advice and counsel is what I call kind of the long tail of legal requests. Like, where do people go for that other than email and Slack currently, or ticketing system, which doesn't work that well. You know, you can use your CLM for that in a lot of ways. So I'm glad to hear that's worked well. It's also one of the great things about a community because you had shared that with a lot of the other ironclad users and all of a sudden they started adopting it and finding great success. And we were able to share the workflow actual file that you use. I know so many people and they've just been able to click in, you know, and implement it into their.

I had no idea you could download the. It was an ICB file. Yeah, it was that, you'll remember. Fantastic. Member of the community was like, hey, Mel, can I have the ICB file? What's that? Well, yeah, here you go. Like, sharing is caring. This isn't necessarily proprietary and it's certainly not confidential. It's just my brain playing around with the functions that you have. And if this helps, let's not reinvent the wheel. And, you know, people will evolve and mold things that, you know, that work best for their business. But I'm a huge believer in that community pace. And we're all. We're all in it together. We're all trying to figure it out together. So let's. Let's learn together.

Rising Tide lifts all the boats and they can all help each other. Absolutely. And what about data? Are you guys doing much in terms of reporting and metrics and analytics? That's always the big question of what data is every legal department using and how is it helpful and how are you making decisions from it?

For sure, we love our data and our legal operations analyst is just obsessed with. This is Jessie Wooderson, who I know that you've connected with. She's obsessed with it. She is amazing. The graphs and the pie charts that she can create very quickly. The practical things that we report on every week in an all staff operations meeting. The new workflows in, in and the new workflows out. And then we also show the type of workflow so we can see what, what department is, is using those legal resources. And the, the key piece is that we report on our service level commitments to the business. Now this was something that I, I put my hand up and said we need to, we need to put some KPIs around our work out to the business for a couple of reasons. We're going to hold ourselves accountable to a certain standard. We're going to say that you will get a response from us within three business days for this type of matter, five business days for this type of matter and 24 hours for this type of matter. They're kind of our three points. And this is contingent upon you giving us full and complete instructions. So you know, you've got to, you've got to come to the table as well. We can't just get, drop some kind of half, half baked workflow and think, yeah, well I'll hear back and it'll be perfect in three days. No, that's, that's not is. You've got to, you've got to be a collaborator as well. But if you give us everything that we need, you will be able to get a really great response and that's going to help you manage your expectations externally with your customer or your vendor. And the key piece, Mary, was that it's going to stop you coming to us and harassing us on Slack or email or pigeon or rocking up at my front door and saying, hey, where's that, where's that, where's that?

That's right.

And, and that for us was a really important piece. We're going to be transparent. We're going to report on that, this and, and we're going to put ourselves out there and hold ourselves to a standard. But in return we expect that you give us that grace and that space to do our work. So you cannot create a workflow and then ping me and say, mel, where's, you know, where's the contract? It's been 20 minutes, you're in a queue. We'll be seen to have, you know, it's about trust. Rest assured you are in capable hands. It hasn't gone into a legal hole, never to return. And if you have not heard back from us within that service level commitment, the gloves are off. The gloves are off. You can come and you can knock on my front door and I 100% have dropped the ball on that. And you best believe that we'll report on that and we'll have a look at the root cause analysis of why we weren't able to meet expectations. So that was the key and the wider team love to see how we're going, how we're tracking and if I can report 100% service level commitment every week, which, you know, which is what we're kind of aiming for, we're not looking for that perfectionism, but we're really trying to show that we're able to meet that need. Then the business is gaining trust and they know to just give us that space to do our work instead of managing a request for updates on work. So it's working really well. And I think that newer, newer members to Megaport that haven't worked with a legal team in this way really appreciate it. They appreciate their transparency and you know, our general counsel has amazing data to see if we're starting to slip and we're only hitting 98, 97, whatever it might be. Well, what's going on? Is there a capacity issue? Do we need to look at additional resource? Do we need to look at self service models? You know, our NDAs are next, their next cab off the rank for this calendar year. What can we do to reduce the time there to make it self service for the business under certain circumstances, you know, how can we, how can we better really, really and truly look at the value of that work and adjust appropriately? Because I think there's a bit of value to be created there. Yeah, yeah, we love the data and it, and it supports all of our bigger efforts to be customer focused.

Fantastic. And it's a process, it's a constant looking at the data and continually iterating your processes and getting better over time. So I want to go back briefly before I forget, to what I read in your bio, which is that you said you believe in progress, not perfection. And I love that. But I want to hear from you. What do you mean by that?

Sure. Look, I truly believe that, that the pursuit of perfection is, it's noble, but it is unsustainable and it is absolutely the crutch to all good things and great things. I would not have started my podcast if I was waiting for the perfect time and the perfect guest and the perfect microphone and the perfect software. It would not have happened and I would not have experienced all of the wonderful things that I have from that project. I would not have come into an in house, into in house if I was waiting for that perfect. You know, level of experience which everyone was telling me was, you know, kind of that five to eight years at the time, six to eight years of experience. I would have missed out on incredible opportunities to be, to be mentored by such, you know, wonderful people. And there's, there's so many, so many examples. We wouldn't have gone out and looked at, looking at CLM and started that project if we were waiting for the perfect time when I had downtime so that I could take on that additional work with the project management, stakeholder engagement, the change management that comes with that, it just would not have happened. And so there would have been just so much wasted opportunity. And of course, you know, being lawyers, we are, we are usually rewarded for perfect. And in certain settings that, that really is a fundamental trait when, when you are looking at particular advice and particular pieces of work. Absolutely. We need that attention to detail and we need to be thorough. It almost goes without saying. Yeah. Where we take it in our one wonderful lawyer brain that tells us that we're, we're not good enough and we have to be absolutely perfect and, and completely, you know, on point every single time. What happens, I find is that the stress that comes with that, the anxiety that comes with that, it stops us from doing things and taking risk. And it also stops us from enjoying the process because we're constantly evaluating ourselves and we always come up short against our own perfect metric. And it's just actually not a thing that exists. And I hated it when I learned that. But I know it to be true. It doesn't exist. Perfect is not a thing. It's an illusion. It's a mirage. It's a statue in a corner that never leaves and gathers dust. And that is not life. And that is not being a part of a dynamic, interesting business and engaging and not being afraid to take risk, to put yourself out there and to show progress, I think is really the key for me. So it's been an ongoing thing and something that I've had to unlearn because I think that law school and then my earlier three years really hammered that into me and, and maybe that was appropriate at the time. I, I don't know. I think there's two sides to every story and it's a double edged sword, this pursuit of perfection. And I certainly learned some wonderful skills and certainly do not send an email without an attachment. I tell you what, because I learned the wrath that I've received the one time I might have done that. But look, the, the business world doesn't expect perfect from Me, me. That's not what I'm paid for. When I need that level of expertise and that attention, that's what our external counsel are for. And even if, even then there is still room to make a call and just, and to have an opinion, to say, look, it could be this or this, but my gut, my instinct and based on my experience is this. And putting my name to a recommendation because I'm not fearful of, of being wrong because it wasn't perfect. It's a big topic, but when I learned how to just let go a little bit of that, that's not to say not having high standards.

That's right.

There is a bit of a gray space in there and that's where the magic is.

I think you're absolutely right and I think it's awesome that that is a principle of yours. And to the conversation we had earlier, that's one of the biggest shifts in mindset that you have from going, going from a private practice law firm where you have to be perfect, it's got to be client ready. Everything that you present has to be absolutely checked, double checked, triple checked, and then you go in house and you've got to make decisions on the fly with limited information and as quickly as possible. And you almost have to learn where's that fine line of, you know, do I have enough information to make an informed decision here? And a call and you know, give the advice that you can give because there's not any more time to get to perfect.

And.

And it's also such a great mindset for transformational role or legal innovation where like you said, there is no perfect. And what's amazing and fun, I think about the journey that I've had in legal ops and transformation is it's all creativity, it's all trial and error, it's experimenting, it's taking risks. And inherent in that is knowing that you're going to try something, learn, pivot, you know, iterate, move the other way and adjust. And that's part of the journey and that's how you get things done. And so, yeah, you can't sit around and wait for the perfect time or the perfect tool or the perfect situation. You just have to dive in and go from there and continue to learn.

Absolutely. And I think that lawyers are actually really creative people and I don't think that we give ourselves enough credit for that. If I had a dollar for every lawyer I know that was a theater nerd or a musical prodig or, you know, absolutely. The performing arts and creative arts in High school or as a child and, and even into university. I was a member of the, the drama society at university, and we started the first Law Review at our university because I saw that university up the road had one and I wanted one. So we, we did that. And, you know, there was. There's a part of us that is creative. We are problem solvers. We do like to think outside of the box, and we're really good at it. We often just don't think that we can or that we don't give ourselves permission to do that. And I think it's a light that can be dimmed a little over the course of our careers. And I encourage everyone that I work with and talk with to just tap back into that light within them. And in fact, particularly in house, you will be rewarded for that because the business loves to see. To see that innovation, the thinking out of the box, at least in my experience. The business wants the lawyer to have an opinion beyond just the law and to make a conclusion and to think about a recommendation that's appropriate. And they may not take it on every time, but they will always appreciate that you went there and you took that creative, commercial side to round out your advice, and you just didn't give the black letter law. That's not, not. That's kind of getting the B plus. But if you really want that A grade, you know, you have to take it a step further and, and say, well, what does this actually mean for the business, knowing what I know?

Exactly. Right. So I guess what's next for the legal team and you at Megaport? You know, what do you hope to accomplish or what are the big priorities for the next 12 months or so?

We have a few. It's such an exciting time. I am learning how to be a leader of people. I'm now, you know, shifted into that. That space for 18 months or so, and I'm absolutely loving that. And I personally had to learn how to let go of being on the tools 100% of the time. And I need to have a bit more space in my day available for who knows what could come, and that. That's actually the role. So I.

And you've made that space for yourself, right, by. By putting in the process?

Yeah, that's such a good point. I've. I've been able to put my brain on a page to a point in terms of some of the workflows and some of the conditional logic of how, you know, certain approvals that just happen without me thinking. And I've created a Standard operating manual or procedure for what it means to, you know, I think I called it how we do the lawyer and around here. So that we have a new, a new council come in and you know, it's kind of like here, here's the playbook, here's, here's all the nitty gritty. It's a big document now, but it's all in there. And that gets people 80% of the way so that, you know, they, they know kind of what, what we're working with. And then I can jump in if needed for some of those finer details. But it's an exciting time of, again, the process improvement. And we're actually going to go to the business and do our first ever customer survey. We're going to ask them what they're enjoying about their experience and what they would like to change about their experience with the legal team. So we do see our colleagues as customers. And yes, we might have a monopoly because they're not exactly allowed to go and procure their own legal services, but that doesn't mean that we take that for granted. We check in with them and in everything that we do, we're thinking about engaging in a customer centric way. Why shouldn't they receive that best service from us even if they have no other choice? So we're going to go to the, the go to the people and see what's working and what needs a tweak and then that'll probably inform a big part of the roadmap. I have a few ideas and a few, like, I don't think a lot of it will come as a surprise to me. I'm already thinking about, you know, where some of those areas are, but we'll see what they say. There will be things we don't know. And that's exciting.

Yeah. You have such a continuous improvement mindset that it's always so refreshing to talk to you about. Well, listen, it was wonderful catching up. Thank you so much for being here today and hopefully I'll get to see you in person sometime soon.

You have to come down under again or, you know, I'll, I'll get myself over to you. I got to meet your colleague Alex in San Francisco last year and I met a few other ironcladders in the, in the halls. But yeah, we'll make it happen.

We will. I think I'll be there in March actually, so we'll, we'll connect on that soon. All right, thank you so much. I'll talk to you, Mary. Bye, everyone.