Australia

ACC Australia, with the support of our Corporate Alliance Program Partners, has produced our annual In-house Trends Survey, which was completed in March-April this year by 212 members. It is with pleasure that we can now provide you with the link to the newly published report.
 
While revisiting trends around legal technology uptake, work-life balance and direct briefing with barristers, this year’s survey also deeply explored the impact of the global pandemic on in-house legal teams, with some surprising and not-so-surprising results.

The report is meaty for those who want to deep dive into the detail. However, if your time is limited, just go straight to page four for a bird’s eye summary of the findings.
 
We are incredibly grateful for our Corporate Alliance Program (CAP) Partners, whose generosity enables us to provide valuable information and quality services to our members. Please ensure you are familiar with our CAP partners, as without them, we would not be able to produce such excellence in publications for you.
 

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Do you need energetic young talent to help out on those research tasks or big projects that you know you have to do, but don’t have the time to do? Do you want to give back to the legal profession and mentor the next generation of lawyers but don’t know where to start? Do you think it’s time the in-house legal profession offer more opportunities to law students, and proactively raise awareness on what a career “in-house” looks like through practical experience? If you’re thinking “YES” in response to these questions, then it sounds like you should host a law student clerk for the upcoming ACC Australia In-House Legal Summer 2021/2022 Clerkship Program!

Click here to read more.

In-house Insiders is a podcast produced by the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC), where you get to hear from some of the most interesting in-house legal professionals in Australia. 

Hosted by Mei Ramsay, Group General Counsel at Medibank, each fortnight we turn the spotlight on a different individual as we dive into their stories, hear about the challenges they've faced along the way, and the lessons they've learned that have defined their careers. Through the series, we speak to people from diverse backgrounds, at different stages of their careers; all with a unique story to tell.

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The Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) In -house Counsel Certification Program covers the core competencies that are applied by corporate counsel professionals. ACC Certification draws on the collective knowledge and experience of ACC’s global membership to identify what is essential to a successful in-house practice worldwide. 

The training is a combination of self-paced online training modules (8) and virtual workshops. The virtual workshops are three hours in duration, four days a week for two weeks.

Monday, August 23 – September 2nd  (Monday to Thursday evenings over consecutive weeks) at 5-8pm Melbourne time. 
 

Member in the Spotlight allows us to get up-close and personal with some of our ACC Australia members. In our last newsletter we featured Andrew Paloni, Senior Legal Counsel at AIMS and a member of the New to In-house Special Interest Group.

Andrew works as a lawyer at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, known as AIMS. AIMS is a Commonwealth research institute that leads marine research across Australia’s tropical north.

To read more about Andrew's experience working at the world’s most advanced research aquarium facility, and his journey in an in-house legal role, click here.

News
 

MON, JUNE 28 2021

Collecting Online Data for eDiscovery & Litigation Readiness Report

ACC and Pagefreezer are pleased to present the Collecting Online Data for eDiscovery & Litigation Readiness Report, which aims to understand how legal departments are dealing with the substantial growth in new data sources that most companies have experienced over the last few years, and to identify key challenges.

MON, JUNE 28 2021

Who Uses What Legal Technology: ACC Legal Operations Technology Survey Report

This report provides a summary of the use of technology within legal departments, based on a survey conducted in autumn 2020 at the behest of the Tools & Technology Interest Group of ACC Legal Operations. 

Australian Corporate Lawyer – Winter 2021 issue available now

Visit the Australian Corporate Lawyer page on the ACC Australia website to read these features from the Winter 2021 issue.  

Featured articles include:

The role of lawyers in the face of Increasingly Capable Technology – David Field, Chief Legal Counsel at Canon Oceania
While talk of artificial intelligence replacing lawyers is a common topic, it is reasonable to expect technology to make increasingly aggressive inroads into the practice of law over coming decades. No sensible lawyer should be resisting this trend, and in fact the true challenge for lawyers lies in collaboration with technology.