A day in the life: Ben Henry, Legal Operations

8:00AM

I always start my mornings by turning on ABC News and putting on a pot of coffee. Once I'm sufficiently caffeinated, I quickly make myself presentable and dive into my emails. We work with teams from across the country who work various hours, so there's usually some updates to get through from the night before. We use a number of collaborative project management tools, but I still always make a list of my own personal goals for the day.

9:00AM

Our Legal Operations team have a daily scrum meeting at 9:00am where we discuss our wins and challenges from the previous day, and what priorities we have for the week. We work collaboratively across a range of projects so this is also a good opportunity for us to also provide updates on progress, identify any issues we've encountered and offer support to one another where we have capacity.

9:30AM

I have a quick catch up meeting with one of the other LOAs about an upcoming workshop with a Dispute Resolution team in the Perth office. We're piloting a new matter management platform with them and want to work through some new ways they can use the platform. We work through our PowerPoint deck and setup up some examples in the platform's test environment for a demonstration in the workshop.

9:45AM

I have a few emails still to catch up on, so I give myself some time to work through these. We coordinate our projects through Microsoft Teams, so I also spend a few minutes updating any tasks there and reviewing any outstanding items.

10:15AM

I'm running a workshop at 11:00am on foreign Transaction Solution matters in Canberra, so I work through my presentation and project artefacts to make sure everything is absolutely ready. As this is the first time we're bringing all the project's stakeholders together, we need to introduce them to a few project governance artefacts which will form the basis of our approach.

11:00AM

The meeting goes successfully and we're able to make great progress. Importantly, we come to agreement on some fundamental elements and have time to establish our approach going forward. After the meeting I debrief with the Legal Operations Consultant who I'm working with on the project and discuss next steps.

12:30PM

I'm a creature of habit and like to keep my lunch break at the same time every day if possible. A huge benefit of working from home is a cooked lunch, so I throw together a pizza and put on another pot of coffee. I spend the rest of my lunch break catching up on some emails for a charity I volunteer with.

1:20PM

I continue some work on a project I'm assisting an interstate Real Estate team with. We're looking at improvements to their processes involved in statutory compliance and I'm working to finalise an initial risk assessment to orientate our priorities. I've scheduled stakeholder meetings later in the week to align my assessments of these risks with their views and to discuss appropriate mitigation strategies.

2:30PM

My manager and I have a presentation to a Senior Associate in Brisbane on a conceptual solution we've created to help automate litigation management. We haven't quite found the right solution yet, but the meeting provides a great opportunity for us to discuss improvements and the potential for wider use in other teams. After the meeting we have a quick debrief to discuss improvements and next steps. I update our project plan and send an update to the Senior Associate.

3:30PM

I have a quick meeting with one of our Legal Operations Consultants about assisting with a data storage project for litigation matters. It's a smaller matter but it has a tight deadline, so I need look at how it might affect my other commitments. We discuss the background and key requirements, and negotiate an achievable deadline.

4:00PM

I have our LGBTI+ network's monthly committee meeting. As the Co-Lead for Community Engagement, I provide an update on a recent partnership meeting with the CEO of a national LGBTI+ charity that I'd facilitated.

4:45PM

I try to resolve some of the issues we'd identified earlier with the litigation management concept. I have the solution in my mind, but just cant work out exactly how to execute it. I work out a couple of the functional issues, but have to leave the rest for the next day.

5:30PM

I check my emails and calendar for tomorrow before logging off for the day. I'm not feeling a run today, so I put on the news in the background and switch to my personal laptop to do some more charity work.