About

How do you suggest in-house lawyers build strong relationships with business partners?

At REA, lawyers are allocated to a line of business within the Group. For example, one lawyer is the primary legal contact for the realestate.com.au business, while another looks after the realcommercial.com.au business. Each lawyer sits on the leadership team of their respective line of business, supporting their business skills in parallel with legal skills development. This structure encourages lawyers to become product experts, to gain deep knowledge of the customer, consumer and commercial issues affecting the business and to form strong working relationships with internal stakeholders. Authenticity and transparency in the legal team are key enablers of building great relationships with the business. REA’s lawyers are now considered an important stakeholder from the inception of new projects, rather than an after-thought or road block. This empowers the business to best understand how to legally bring a product to market, make claims and negotiate deals more effectively from the beginning, saving time, cost and enhancing everyone’s productivity.

My leadership has seen the legal team embrace agile working methodologies, contribute to REA’s strategic vision through closer partnership with the business, and adopt a culture of continuous improvement. The legal team’s overall engagement improved 21% YOY to a record high of 97% in FY19. The team also scored 100% in a number of key engagement metrics including “alignment to business strategy” and “understanding how my work contributes to the overall strategy”.

REA positions its lawyers on the executive leadership team, its global senior leadership team and each line-of-business leadership team. As genuine business partners, REA has seen its lawyers develop a deep knowledge of the businesses and advise with greater precision, speed and commercial value than if they were sideline advisors.

What “legal tech” products do you currently utilise, and do you foresee implementing more of these in the near future?

The REA legal team was one of the first legal teams in Australia to adopt agile working methodologies which emphasise transparency, collaboration and iterative changes rather than large-scale projects. Every member of the legal team uses agile processes and methodologies to identify and solve problems, in collaboration with other specialists within the business. The team uses Trello, an online agile work management system, and stand up meetings and other contact points such as Slack as a way of collaborating and sharing information between teams, and the wider business.

All of REA’s customer contracts (over 70,000) are now delivered and signed electronically. NDAs are digital and REA implemented a new contract management system, uploading and coding thousands of contracts.

In addition, the REA legal team have developed several key initiatives to improve business efficiency and productivity, including “The Claiminator”. REA operates in a competitive environment, with leadership claims being used across multiple sets of marketing material for customers, consumers and investors. The legal team created a dynamic resource for internal stakeholders to easily craft leadership claims using current audience data, matched with legally pre-approved sources. The Claiminator was launched to the business in October 2017 via intranet, instant messaging and at all line-of-business leadership teams in Australia. The data feeds automatically from REA’s data analytics database and provides rolling audience engagement metrics for the company’s major websites and apps. Since being implemented, the tool has significantly reduced the back and forth in the marketing approval process, eliminated external spend, and ensured consistency in claims being used externally.

Under my leadership, the REA legal team has launched a continuous improvement and innovation project to reimagine how the team delivers legal services to the business. Named “Project Hoover”, the initiative involved engaging key stakeholders across the business to identify areas for improvement. The legal team then commenced a process of designing and delivering changes to its services to best meet the needs of the business and deliver outcomes quicker.

To date, key improvements have included:

• A new due diligence process

• Better methods for assessing related party transactions

• A tool for accessing current and verified marketing statistics

• Quicker responses to standard questions and information requests

• Improved privacy impact assessment tools, and

• An internal communications plan for bringing legal changes and initiatives to business decision makers faster.

The legal team plays an active role in REA’s Hack Day programme, helping other parts of the business with their own improvement projects.

All members of the legal team are encouraged to identify new opportunities for improvement and are given the time and flexibility to work on the project, with “Hoovering” becoming a commonly used verb in the team’s lexicon.

Have any new laws, regulations or judicial decisions greatly impacted your company’s business or your legal practice?

The Australia Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) handed down its Digital Platforms Inquiry Report in June 2019. Its recommendations in relation to privacy will fundamentally change the way Australian businesses capture, use, store and erase, personal information. Consumer privacy and protection is critically important to REA and the legal team is already working collaboratively with cross-business and function teams to workshop responses to any new changes that are introduced.

If you had to give advice to an aspiring in-house lawyer or GC what would it be and why?

Really understand the business, its purposes, strategy and drivers. In house lawyers are business partners, not a separate professional services division. Developing strong relationships with key stakeholders across the business is invaluable and ensures that you’re considered as a key project member from its inception.

At REA, we put people, and our lawyers, at the heart of every decision. We achieve results together, taking personal responsibility for keeping things moving and achieving an outcome. That also means aligning with REA’s values, so that advice and decisions are values-based, and not merely a matter of legal compliance.