What has been the number one challenge that has impacted you over the past year?

The key issue for many in-house counsel is delivering quality legal services from a commercial and legal risk perspective, while managing increasing business demands and constantly evolving global laws with limited resources.

Despite this challenge, I have been fortunate to lead legal work on some key strategic priorities for the Aristocrat business. Examples include:

Leading Aristocrat’s ESG modern slavery efforts and over-delivering on expectations by achieving an ‘A’ rating for its 2021 Modern Slavery Statement from one of Australia’s leading universities, Monash University. This places Aristocrat within the top 25% of ASX100 companies, and we were specifically called out as one of only five companies who demonstrated the biggest improvements in the quality of their modern slavery statements from 2020 to 2021. Aristocrat was proud of this achievement and its link to our corporate value – ‘Good Business. Good Citizen.’

Contributing to the launch of Australia’s first-ever trial of cashless electronic gaming machine play, also called a digital wallet trial in NSW, which was achieved with the support of regulators, and which may help enhance the long-term sustainability and vibrancy of our industry. The trial is underway.

To overcome this challenge, I led my team to work smarter, not harder, by re-thinking how best to deliver value to the business which meets and exceeds objectives. My team achieved this by streamlining processes and utilising technology and alternative legal service providers to create efficiencies, including by automating BAU agreements.

Looking forward, what technological advancements do you feel will impact the role of in-house legal teams in the future most?

The role of technology in the legal sector continues to be on the rise. From electronic document management to electronic billing, automated legal intake processes and more, in-house lawyers can expect even more diverse offerings in the future.

A large number of in-house teams have already invested in technology in varying degrees, and I expect this trend to continue.

These advancements have positively impacted in-house legal teams who are usually struggling with the volume of work. They assist to streamline processes and allow lawyers to relegate some repetitive, administrative, or low value work to technological solutions, allowing a focus on legal work that truly adds value to the business whilst enabling a greater volume of work to be completed at lower cost. This is a win:win for in-house legal teams and for businesses.

Moving forward, I expect the use of AI to make a greater impact on the legal profession. While there are some AI offerings available in the legal space currently, future evolutions of this technology will aid in-house teams even further.

What would you say are the unique qualities required to be successful as an in-house lawyer in your industry?

Being very good at understanding and applying the law is essential, but also a minimum requirement for success. Additional qualities that are imperative and which go beyond knowledge of the law include being truly commercial – really understanding your organisation and always aiming to create practical legal solutions to address business needs while mitigating legal risk, even if this requires thinking outside the box.

Secondly, one must have a high proficiency in soft skills – your ability to communicate, influence and negotiate at all levels of the organisation and with the legal teams for any counterparties are all invaluable to achieving successful business outcomes.