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

I initially joined AMP in 2017 as senior legal counsel for AMP Bank, and in mid-2018 moved into my current role. In my current role I am responsible for managing all business aspects of the AMP legal and governance function, as well as providing legal advice on sensitive issues impacting AMP. During my time in this role, I have: (i) formalised a legal operations discipline for AMP’s legal and governance function; (ii) introduced an end-to-end matter triage, document management and e-billing software solution, LawVu, which not only enables legal and governance to service our clients faster, but also provides detailed metrics on our performance and spend, allowing us to make better data-driven decisions on our service and financial performance; (iii) implemented an external legal panel engagement guideline, mandating that our lawyers always obtain competitive (and preferably fixed price) quotes before engaging external legal, resulting in a 12% reduction in external spend year on year; (iv) provided legal support to the AMP Foundation, AMP’s independently funded corporate charitable foundation.

In your opinion, what are the qualities and skills needed to form a strong legal team?

In my view, the three key qualities and skills needed to form a strong legal team are:

A clear strategic vision for the team and ensuring that each team member understands their part in delivering on the strategy.

A commercial mindset to ensure that you can best engage with the business.

A “play as one team” mentality, both within the legal team and with the business. You will not achieve greatness fighting turf wars.

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

AMP is currently progressing through a period of significant organisational change and is refocussing its efforts as a largely domestic financial services business. As we reshape, we need to continually challenge our mindset to ensure that our strategy and behaviours align to the organisation we will become, rather than who we were. I constantly challenge our legal and governance staff to utilise a start-up mentality and to think about more efficient ways to service our clients.

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

Like many parents, when my children were small it was challenging to strike the balance between caring for a young family, engaging in challenging work which allowed me to develop my career and delivering for my clients and team. Now that my children are older this thankfully is not as much of an issue as it once was. However, I am thrilled that the recent changes towards hybrid working environments will allow more parents the flexibility to have more opportunities both in their family and working lives if they so choose.