Q&A with James Nickless, General Counsel at the Maxsoft Group

We recently sat down with James Nickless, General Counsel at The MaxSoft Group.

MaxSoft (through its subsidiaries including StrataMax, StrataCash, StrataPay and StrataLoans) is one of the leading providers of software and financial services to the body corporate and strata industry.

James, having previously been a Partner at 2 national law firms specialising in body corporate and strata law, has been General Counsel at MaxSoft for 2.5 years.

James is the first legal counsel employed by MaxSoft and, in his first General Counsel role, he shares his thoughts on lessons learnt in the past 2.5 years.

What are some of the biggest lessons learned from your first role as General Counsel?

• You are not the rock star anymore.  In private practice, the lawyers are the producers who provide the services that generate the revenue.  Everything in a law firm is designed around supporting the lawyers and enabling them to perform at their best.  In a software company, the software developers are the rock stars and the lawyer plays a supporting role.  It is difficult to appreciate the value you are providing by reducing risk, improving compliance and often advising against certain initiatives when compared to the much more tangible value calculation about total billable hours per year.
• Non-lawyers often perceive you differently to how other lawyers do.  Sometimes off the cuff comments or personal opinions can be taken as set-in-stone, legal gospel by colleagues just because “the lawyer said it”.  You have to be careful to clearly distinguish at times when you are giving a legal opinion and when you are simply offering a commercial or personal perspective on something.  When you are used to debating and brainstorming legal concepts with other lawyers, it can be challenging when people simply take your conjecture as “the answer” and when they interpret your weighing up alternatives as “not knowing the answer”.
• Not everybody thinks like you do.  In law firms, there are generally more similar personality types and thinking styles than in-house (massive over-generalisation, I know).  It is both challenging and rewarding to look past these differences and to collaborate with others that think and act completely differently to the way you are used to doing things.  I have really learned to try harder to truly understand the ideas of others and find the value that isn’t immediately apparent to me.  It is amazing that the process for generating good ideas and solving problems in-house is not always a linear, logical and controlled process.  Often someone else’s throw away comment can spark a genius solution that no one person would have come up with on their own.

What is your favourite thing about working in-house?

Having “buy-in” to the company as a whole and being able to experience the difference made by my contribution.  In private practice, much of my interaction with clients was transactional in nature and I didn’t often get to see the lasting effects of my work.  It would generally be the case that “if it ain’t broke, don’t talk to the lawyer”.  It is nice now to be able to give things the full attention that they need, not simply the amount of time I could allocate between various clients or the effort commensurate with the amount a client wanted to pay.

We thank James for his time and for sharing these thoughts and lessons.  Hopefully they resonate with other in-house lawyers.

At Sierra Legal, we assist a number of in-house legal teams.  If you are interested in exploring different ways of working, we would be happy to share some insights with you.  These insights include some things other in-house legal teams are doing to deliver value to their clients and get the most out of their external legal spend.  Please get in touch with one of the Sierra Legal team - https://www.sierralegal.com.au/team