Observations from the Dark Side: 6 months at Sierra Legal for Michael Abrahams

It is now six months since Senior Consultant, Michael Abrahams, joined us in a part time capacity (while continuing his other role as General Counsel, Company Secretary & Integrity Officer at Essendon Football Club).

We sat down with Michael to talk about his observations on returning to private practice after almost 15 years as an in-house lawyer.

What are the key differences between working in-house and advising clients in private practice?

As an in-house lawyer, you have a range of internal clients, but you are a part of the organisation itself, so you develop a deep understanding of the organisation, its priorities and how it thinks and you also have an opportunity to influence and improve the organisation from the inside.

Private practice lawyers aren’t usually embedded in the client’s business in the same way, but you do get the opportunity to work with a wider range of clients in different industries and have the benefit of working alongside other senior lawyers (which you don’t necessarily get to do in-house).

Based on your experience, are there opportunities for businesses and their lawyers to get more out of the relationship by thinking in different ways?

Absolutely! In my experience, businesses often look at contracts and other legal matters on an individual basis and only involve their lawyers when more significant matters come to their attention.

Sometimes these matters take up a lot of legal resources and can arise when the client is already practically committed to the transaction (so are no longer in the best bargaining position).

Alongside this, the business will inevitably be entering a significant number of other contracts all the time (which may not be very formal or obvious, such as when buying on a supplier’s terms) and these might get no attention from a legal or risk perspective.

I think there is huge scope for businesses to address this by using the right external lawyers to help them identify their true key risks and create the systems, procedures and templates to address them in a systematic and efficient way.  Technology can play an important role in this and it’s exciting that at Sierra we are able to offer an extra element to this service through our contract automation service, Arreis Automation.

Personally, moving back into a private practice as a senior lawyer, it’s great to have the opportunity to take what I have learned in-house and make a difference for a range of clients and not just my one employer.