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

Any success in a role is of course a product of the team you work with. And I am fortunate to have a fantastic team and manager. Designing, building and operationalising an international airport from scratch is an immense and complicated task, which presents many challenges. Chief among these, is the importance of recognising that you are managing taxpayer dollars and an investment on behalf of the Commonwealth Government, in a multi-tiered regulatory environment. And so, our chief success as a legal team has been to respond to and manage those factors efficiently but in a way that is supportive of appropriate operational, commercial and regulatory outcomes. We have sought to enable the various business units with responsibility for everything from trademark applications to multi-billion-dollar construction budgets to maintaining community outreach to connecting infrastructure and utilities to do so successfully. Another significant success has been to build a team of eight talented and engaged lawyers and company secretarial staff who are tight-knit and passionate about what they do.

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

Resilience, talent and cohesiveness. As a function which is often non-revenue generating, operating at the border between legal advice and corporate decision-making can be a high pressure, stressful situation to practice within. Resources are necessarily limited, deadlines are often tight, and the demands multi-faceted. It is important to stay healthy and strong, willing to push back whilst also being constructive and helpful, and bonded to one another so that there is always mutual support.

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

The biggest risk to aviation and airports is global instability, wherever it comes from – wars, pandemics, supply chain shortages, fuel price hikes. But these can also present challenges to be overcome and provide inspiration – for example, with respect to sustainability. Being prepared involves knowing that you cannot predict everything, but you can draw on past experience to ensure that you have the resources, and the internal knowledge, to meet those challenges and rise to them.

Being innovative with the way you deploy those resources and knowledge is vital, too.

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

I have sought to overcome two related challenges in particular: having the courage to pursue what I am interested in, even if that is not ‘on the beaten path’, and then working incredibly hard to find the opportunities that match those interests. My career path has not been typical of a corporate lawyer: I started out working in the Office of the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. But I knew I did not want to settle for the typical corporate lawyer path, and I am glad I did not, no matter how nervous I was about that at the time. Outside of my ‘day job’ as a lawyer, I am also a private pilot and I have always tried to have my passion for aviation at the centre of both my work and personal lives. To achieve that, I have had to pull out all stops along the way to show my commitment and ability to each job I have held, to be sure that those next, higher-up positions become available, and I could apply, not always with success, but at least with confidence.