Could you share an example of a time when you came up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works and did not come at a large expense  

Having a culture of continuous learning and improvement is a fundamental value at Property Finder. This means our legal team invests essential time reflecting on and sharing ideas about what the future of our team could look like, and we were unanimous that we needed to become a much more data-informed legal team. To achieve this, we made some simple but impactful changes to the way we work: we identified, designed and implemented a matter management platform which allows us to systematically streamline workflows and to track internal and external matters from a single source of truth. To compliment this, we crafted and integrated configurable intake forms based on the bespoke needs of different internal clients/business units. Most importantly we actively trained, facilitated and promoted self-service for certain legal documents and processes across the business, the results of which have been very encouraging thus far. By introducing these changes, we are benefitting from having a legal function that is seamlessly connected to the business, enabling our team to quickly harness insights by leveraging cross-business collaboration, and showcase with greater credibility how the legal team can advise the business to make smarter future decisions.  

How do you balance your responsibilities as a GC with your involvement in dispute resolution and M&A matters?  

As general counsel of Property Finder, people are fundamental to the success of our business. And navigating relationship dynamics between the executive management team, the board, investors and various other internal and external stakeholders is a critical component of my role. As such I prioritise investing meaningful time and effort into my business relationships, including fostering a transparent relationship with the board and investors. The GC’s role is tied to risk, so understanding the risk profile and appetite of the business is also fundamental. Communication is key here, and I am careful and deliberate about having regular conversations and sharing relevant information between the executive leadership team and the board regarding our ongoing day-to-day work as well as high-value transactions so that the risk is properly contextualised and understood. Ultimately, by focusing on building trust, consensus and credibility it goes a long way towards amplifying my success as a legal leader.  

Can you foresee any key developments to the way general counsel work over the next five years?  

Every in-house legal professional, including the General Counsel, wants to be more effective and efficient in the way they work, so I often reflect on how we can go beyond the buzzwords and empower actual change, now and in the future. I really believe that we need to recognise that the conversation around wellbeing at work is changing, and that people’s wellbeing impacts every aspect of an organisation, from culture to engagement, leadership to productivity. This topic resonates strongly with me and will certainly be top of mind for me over the coming years. Another exciting and rapidly developing area is legal operations, including legal design, which I see as consisting of multiple discrete components in the legal workspace building upon and reinforcing each other to enable legal teams to do their best work all in one place. At Property Finder we continue to invest in and refine our legal operations, and as a result we are seeing that we can get more done, reduce risk, and focus on  

impacting business outcomes, all of which leads to increased efficiency and significant ROI. And of course, we will continue to see a significant increase in the impact of blockchain technology, large language models and AI adoption in general. While we as legal professionals continue to discover and explore this new digital universe, my hope is that these advances will enable legal teams to free up resources and focus on providing consistent high-quality advisory and strategic services to the business.  

How do you prioritise diversity and inclusion within your legal department, and what initiatives have you implemented to foster a more inclusive and equitable work environment?  

I’m passionate about building high-performance legal teams, so its massively important to me that the contributions, perspectives, and presence of all the different members of our team are valued and integrated into the work that we do and the impact we have across our organisation. While there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to achieving meaningful diversity, equity and inclusion, there are a few things that I believe you need to get right and that we have implemented in our team environment. 1. Be as transparent as possible with each other and communicate with the team constantly (more is more). 2. Great ideas don’t apply a hierarchy, so we openly and actively solicit input from all team members on how the legal function and team should operate and go about its activities and responsibilities. 3. Guide and mentor the team on how to build their personal brand and provide them with lots of opportunity to further grow and develop through facilitating and funding continuing professional development and learning. And this encompasses learning that is broader than just legal topics, so we also introduced programmes addressing project management, financial literacy, and data science. 4. Most importantly, we prioritise publicly recognising the achievements and successes of the team, individually and collectively, and we do this consistently and authentically.