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Fiona McLeay - Human Rights Career SeriesLet me start by saying whatI don't want to achieve by talking to you, before I tell you what I do hope to achieve. I don't want this to be one of those talks - I've been to several - where someone stands up and gives you the three point outline about how to develop a five year plan to end up with either your dream job, or a job "just like mine"! The kind of talk that Jane Fraser, writing in the Weekend Australian several years ago, described as "the statutory speech" where "a sobbingly successful glass-ceiling smasher described her vast successes, her grit in the face of insurmountable odds, her reservoirs of energy, her terrorist attacks on men ..., making most of us feel like going off to eat worms." I hope there will be no worms consumed at the end of today's lunch! Instead, I hope by the end of our time together to have given you an idea of some of the possibilities of life in the law, by taking you through some of the turnings and meanderings of my own experience. At the end, there'll be no three-point outlines, but a few suggestions of things that helped me along the way. I started as General Counsel at World Vision Australia (WVA) in February 2006. It's a new position for WVA and a new role for me; essentially it involves managing WVA's legal risk. This ranges from employment to IP, from drafting contracts for fundraising partnerships to contracts for development projects in Africa, from board policies to leases for warehouses. In fact, just about everything you can think of. In lots of ways, it IS a dream job, despite my comments about people who talk about "dream jobs". I'm a person who likes lots of variety, as well as a challenge and this job has both. It's also fantastic to be working in a place where the ultimate aim - to provide aid and community development to the world's poor - is something that I have been passionate about for many years. It's also a chance to bring together some other interests I have - a lawyer's obligation to pro bono work, and corporate social responsibility (CSR) and human rights. In fact, when I look back over the last 11 years since I graduated from University of NSW law school, this job seems like the perfect fit. But it took me a long time to get here. I stumbled into law school almost by accident - in those pre-HECS days you could still do that...! I had very little idea what I wanted to do after high school, but I knew I wanted to go to Melbourne Uni, because I loved the bluestone and sandstone and the proximity to Lygon Street. I was interested in psychology and classical studies, but was encouraged to add law to my preferences by my careers counsellor, who told me that I couldn't put just one university and one course on my form. Having got a place at law school, I decided to take a year off and found work - somehow - as a legal secretary at a large city firm. When I turned up to my first day of law school the following year, I found that the classroom was nothing like the office. Indeed, it was significantly less interesting and there seemed no relationship between the cut and thrust of the industrial relations practice where I had worked and first year "HIPL and TIPL" - History and Philosophy of Law, and Tors and the Process of Law. I lasted one year and then deferred law, picking up criminology and finishing my arts degree with criminology honours and a major in psychology. But what to do next? I needed to find some sort of paying work and to be honest, I didn't want the law degree to beat me. I went back to uni, at UNSW, and finished my law degree, graduating seven years after that first year at Melbourne Uni. I found law a little more interesting the second time around, and also learned about the idea of law as a public service profession, and the important role of lawyers in the administration of justice and the rule of law. During law school I had volunteered at my local community legal centre and complete the clinical legal program at Kingsford Legal Service. I was very keen to work in a CLC, which I felt was a good fit for my interests and personality. This turned out to be a very difficult thing to achieve fresh out of law school. Then, as now, finding your first job was pretty tough and very competitive. The combination of a new graduate's lack of practice experience and the limited funding of CLCs meant that entry level jobs were almost impossible to find. So, when I threw my hat into the graduate recruitment ring, and was offered a place at a large Sydney firm, I figured I'd better take it. I can still remember sitting in reception on my first day, in my brand new (and only) suit, wondering how on earth I'd got there, and how long it was going to take for the firm to realise their terrible mistake and escort me from the building. However, strangely, this didn't happen. While it did feel like an unfamiliar environment for quite a while, I realised that a firm was a great place to learn. Lots of resources went into my training. I learned practical legal skills such as how to draft letters, negotiate settlements and turn legal research into sensible advice. I met some great lawyers who became mentors and friends. I also got involved in my first pro bono file, helping the Public Interest Advocacy Centre get evidence from a member of the Stolen Generations for a possible test case. Despite all this though, I still felt that a CLC was where I'd end up. So when I returned to Melbourne in 1998 I tried once again to get a CLC position. This time I seemed to be ruled out by 18 months in a big firm - I didn't know much about CLC bread and butter areas like family and discrimination law, despite having studied both at uni. Meanwhile, the skills I had developed in the construction and engineering legal team at the firm turned out to be in hot demand. So after a couple of months, I accepted a job at Clayton Utz and resigned myself to my fate. As it turned out, my fate at Clayton Utz turned out not to be nearly as bad as I expected. In fact, my 8 years at the firm were enormously satisfying and productive, and in many ways laid the foundation for where I am now. Clayton Utz had (and still has) a great pro bono policy (one of the reasons I took the job there), which stated that pro bono work was the responsibility of all lawyers. I took up several pro bono files during my first year or so. This experience led me to see an opportunity to develop the firm's pro bono program in Melbourne, as well as pursue my interest in justice. I suggested to the firm that I be appointed as part time "pro bono coordinator" in the Melbourne office, to work with the full time pro bono director who was based in Sydney. The firm agreed, and I found myself with a new role, which I balanced with my construction law practice. I really enjoyed the chance to be an internal and external advocate for pro bono work. It gave me great opportunities to interact with people across the firm and the profession, including in CLCs. Best of all, I felt like what I was doing was 'making a difference' - the struggles of individual people were helped by the legal resources I was able to organise. Several years later, Clayton Utz was one of 5 firms which partnered with the Public Interest Law Clearing House to pioneer the Homeless Persons' Legal Clinic. Through the Clinic I saw new ways that the resources of a large firm could have a huge impact on helping people who had been marginalised and largely forgotten by the justice system. My interest in the obligations of lawyers as professionals expanded to a consideration of the obligations of law firms as businesses when Clayton Utz underwent a restructure in 2000. This set me wondering - what did adopting a business structure mean for the profession of law? Did CSR - the idea that business has responsibilities and not just rights - have any application? The firm were prepared to let me research this question, and I produced a report on CSR and the law firm. This concluded that firms in fact have dual obligations - as lawyers, they have a professional obligation to provide pro bono legal services. As a business, they also have obligations to be good corporate citizens. Building on a fledgling program in the Melbourne office, I proposed the development of what became known as "Community Connect:. This was a corporate citizenship program, giving all of the firm's staff, not just the lawyers, the chance to give to the community. Volunteering programs were established in each office, and the Clayton Utz Foundation was set up. In addition to my pro bono and construction law responsibilities, I added Director, Community Connect to my titles, with oversight over the development of the program in the firm's 6 offices. As I said, I like variety, and in my ceaseless pursuit of this, in 2004 I received a scholarship to New York University Law School to undertake a masters in Global Public Service Law. This encouraged me to continue to think about the big picture of law and the role of lawyers, on a global scale. This followed on from another LLM in public and international law, which I had completed at Melbourne Uni part time. The combination of this study and my experience in the firm had expanded my horizons, to see law and lawyers, as able to play a much bigger role than assisting clients one at a time. So you can see why World Vision was attractive. And so here I am today ... General Counsel at WVA. Since starting, I've discovered that WVA is Australia's favourite overseas aid and development NGO. Last financial year, Australians entrusted us with around $320 million, helped in no small part by their amazing response to the tsunami. World Vision's mission is to be a Christian organisation that engages people to eliminate poverty and its causes. It's an urgent and vital challenge:
The good news is that we can make a difference on this, even while there is to much to be done. Total global aid is on the increase again (after a decline in the mid-90s). But is still less than US$90 billion (a fraction of the US$1 trillion which the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) estimated was spent on global defence spending in 2005). (1) And 15 years ago, 50,000 people died every day of "stupid poverty". Being part of the challenge is the highlight of my work at WVA. If you are interested, I recommend Jeffrey Sachs "The End of Poverty" as a rallying cry to our generation to take the historic opportunity we have to end what Bono calls "stupid poverty" by 2025. Or check out World Vision Connect at http://wwwvision.com.au/wvconnect/ for some ideas about how to get involved. Now, I said no three-point plan, but some suggestions of what worked for me. 1. Sometimes you can't see where something is heading, but that doesn't mean you aren't going anywhere. This is certainly true when you're doing discovery on a large piece of litigation, or a due diligence for an M&A deal, or doing endless conveyances or wills. But even in those kinds of situations, I learned about myself, about others, and gained skills in application, organisation, teamwork and perseverance. I also learned some very useful commercial skills - by this I mean an ability to think strategically and to consider not just the end goal, but how to get there in a cost effective and practical way. These are all very useful in the not for profit sector. 2. The people that you work with are as important - perhaps even more important - than the work that you do. I didn't choose construction law because I had set my heart on that sort of work. In fact, I had no idea such a thing existed until I started work. I actually chose it because I liked the lawyers that I was working with, and they were (mostly!) the sort of people I was happy to spend long hours with, and learn from. They seemed to understand me, and that turned out to be good intuition - the support of the partners I worked for was invaluable as I defined and refined my role. 3. Be willing to take opportunities as they come up. There are lots of paths you can go down. As long as you use your common sense, there's probably no "wrong" way to go, just different paths. Don't close yourself off to something because you think you won't like it, or because you are afraid, or because your friends or family think it's a bit strange. Be brave and step out of your comfort zone so life can happen to you - and see where it takes you.
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