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‘If you set goals but don’t revisit, the goalposts may have changed’
An award-winning in-house lawyer discusses practical tips about how her legal team tracks their path when looking at the year ahead to ensure their work aligns with their and the business’s goals.
Jess Feyder
Recently on The Corporate Counsel Show, host Jerome Doraisamy spoke with Who Gives A Crap legal beagle Kate Sherburn.
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“If you don’t take a step back and look at what you are doing, there’s a real risk that you’re not on the right path,” explained Ms Sherburn.
“We have come into 2023 really trying to be more intentional with everything we do,” she said of her legal team, “and the way that we’ve done this is trying to take stock of everything for the moment and look ahead at our goals”.
“We are a very small legal team, but we had a planning day quite early on in 2023. We blocked the entire day out and met in person, and we started with a piece of butcher’s paper and some Sharpies and just wrote.
“We looked at what the company-wide goals are, what we want to do as a legal team, what projects we’ve started doing, and also work that we know is coming our way or has already arrived.”
“We did this big brainstorm and grouped things into themes and then set clear goals for the year and started to get a little bit more concrete what our objectives are for the year, where they ladder up to business goals, what we want our results to be,” she continued.
“We look at the end of the year; what do we want to have achieved?
“Some of those are particular, some of the others are kind of higher level, broader sort of goals.”
Ms Sherburn also explained how her team keeps on top of goals as the year progresses.
“We have fortnightly meetings specifically around where we’re at and tracking. We make sure that we stay across where we want to be and continue to reprioritise,” she said.
“We also check if it’s still the same priority — if you just set your sort of goals for the year, but then you don’t continually revisit it, you might be following those goals exactly, but the goalposts may have changed.
“You want to make sure that you’re actually doing beneficial work.”
