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For Amber Warren, injecting positivity and optimism into the office and de-escalating situations with humour leads to greater productivity.
In a recent episode of Legal Firesides, Dentons Australia chair and Australasia region CEO Amber Warren discussed, among other things, her vision for the world’s biggest firm Down Under and creating meaningful career pathways for younger lawyers.
In the same conversation, Warren reflected on the importance of ensuring that the BigLaw firm’s lawyers are enjoying their time in the workplace. Working with one’s colleagues, she said, should be fun.
“Law firms are an intense environment, and client pressures can be huge. Court timetables can be difficult as well. [As such], you have to come to work every day and have fun. It makes you a productive person, it keeps you engaged,“ she said.
“People often say, well, what are the challenges for a law firm? My way of looking at it is [to ask] what are the opportunities for us? A negative is always a positive if you look at it in the right way. So, asking, is this an opportunity for us to invent a new product line or a new way of delivering service to clients?”
It’s not about being fearful, Warren went on: “It’s about looking at it from a positive and opportunistic point of view and saying, well, how can we harness this and how can we provide a fun and meaningful environment for our staff and deliver something a little bit different and a little bit novel that adds value to our clients?”
When asked how she looks to create or have fun in the day-to-day, Warren said that she’s “a bit of a joker and a prankster”.
She’s got, she mused, “a very solid internal reputation for that”.
“I just think that very little is worth stressing about or creating pressure about for others. My general view is that you [should] come at things with positivity and optimism, and you de-escalate difficult situations with a bit of humour,” she said.
“I think, if you, as a leader, are doing that, it starts to permeate the organisation that people realise that we’re all gonna make mistakes. The important thing is to say, ‘I made a terrible mistake. Let me tell you about it.’ It can be quite funny in hindsight, and you give other people the opportunity to learn from that.”
Warren added that if leaders can say out loud that they are fallible, and detail the ways in which they made mistakes, it gives permission to other lawyers to own their mistakes and realise they aren’t terrible lawyers, even if they have dropped the ball on occasion.
“We’re all going to make mistakes; we need to own them and embrace them,” she said.
More broadly, Warren reflected on the fact that all lawyers want to be engaged in work that makes them feel as though they’re making a genuine contribution to their clients and to society at large.
“We also want an opportunity to showcase our own individual expertise, rather than being part of a cohort of graduates,” she said.
A good example of this comes in the form of a young lawyer at Dentons right now, whom Warren called “a genius when it comes to AI automation and technology”.
She said that she wants this rising star “in a room with our CIO and COO, and other senior leaders”, given this expertise, rather than looking at her as someone who is simply a junior practitioner who needs to wait their turn.
“I want to look at her and say, ‘you’re a human being with an excellent skill set, that we can then bring into our firm’”.
What such an attitude towards the next generation leads to, Warren said, is that this young lawyer feels challenged and that the firm values her. “That keeps you engaged, it keeps you working hard, but ultimately it also keeps them with the firm,” she said.
Jerome Doraisamy is the managing editor of professional services (including Lawyers Weekly, HR Leader, Accountants Daily, and Accounting Times). He is also the author of The Wellness Doctrines book series, an admitted solicitor in New South Wales, and a board director of the Minds Count Foundation.
You can email Jerome at:
