Speaking to Lawyers Weekly’s Protégé, Ms McLaughlin said her desire to pursue legal work came from the work she saw done by in-house lawyers at her previous company. As the “heaviest influence” in her career change, Ms McLaughlin said she liked seeing how much they influenced business decisions with their wide breadth of knowledge.  

“Working in a large corporation before, I was lucky enough to get exposed to a variety of things and I am lucky enough in my role now that I’ve got the same opportunities to have quite broad exposure,” Ms McLaughlin said, adding one of the experiences which she has really enjoyed is learning new things and new roles in a day-to-day role. 

It is one of the opportunities she said she now gets working as a law graduate with top firm Allens. During her time at Murdoch University, Ms McLaughlin worked with Allens in a paralegal role and said she was lucky to be offered a different role after graduating. It did have to take a back step, however, as she prepared to welcome a new baby. 

“They are absolutely fantastic. I was due to start in February but I had to tell them that I couldn’t start because I was going to have a baby,” Ms McLaughlin said, adding that they have been “nothing but supportive and amazing” as she settled into being a mum.  

Beginning at Allens ranks as one of the career highlights alongside getting the chance to travel and study in Italy. It was here that Ms McLaughlin chose to study comparative law by the dean of law himself whose passion in law lent to the “amazing experience”. 

“Knowing things about comparative law has already been helpful in the short time that I have been working already and it’s something you don’t get exposure to in your usual Priestly unit, so it has definitely helped. It was a really great program,” she said. 

Ms McLaughlin said one of the reasons she opted to study at Murdoch was its flexibility for working students. At the beginning of the degree, Ms McLaughlin was studying just part-time so she could manage her studies around a full-time job. Soon after, however, she put her life on hold and started full-time studies so she could get started in the law.

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After graduation, and having just welcomed her new baby, Ms McLaughlin was told by the university that she had finished at the top of her class and would be receiving the annual Francis Burt Chambers Medal, given to the highest academic result in law. 

“It was really gratifying. The career that I had before, I really loved it. I really loved my workplace, I really loved my team and I had a fantastic boss. The push to go and study was seeing the type of work that I wanted to be doing in the future and knowing that I wanted to be in that place in the next five to 10 years, so I had to study to get there,” she said. 

“That was a really hard decision to make to walk away from that and obviously to walk away from a great job to then not working. It was almost a relief [to receive the award], like you didn’t make the wrong decision by leaving your great job.”

Now that she has graduated and started at Allens, Ms McLaughlin doesn’t have much of the same specific career goals like many of her peers. Rather than aiming to reach partner in the next 10 years, she wants to be someone clients can truly rely on. 

“I think the one thing I’ve learnt from having a career before is that what I get the most satisfaction out of is being known as a good practitioner and having people that want to work with me and then getting great exposure and opportunities to work with great clients on some great matters,” she said. “That’s very much more my goal.”

For law students starting out in the law, Ms McLaughlin has two pieces of advice. First, connect with the peers around you and be open to the great friendships and networks. 

“Having a great group of people that I could message and rely on and talk things out was invaluable and I think sometimes that the medal is not mine individually but more of a reflection of the fantastic cohort that I studied with. They were very collegial, and everyone always helped each other out and really supported each other,” she said. 

The second is to ask for feedback and take it on board. She said that those professors who are delivering lecturers and tutors are experts and they are there to give feedback to help the next group of law students succeed in the profession. 

“Getting feedback from lecturers and tutors around the mark, I definitely improved and it definitely helped me with my grades but more so the ongoing value is that it helped me at work and helped me be a better performer in the workplace,” she said.