63. Legal Is Not the Department of 'No' with Jess Carroll

This episode is a little different, because I am introducing you to Lily, the newest member of the Counsel Media team and the first person I have hired since turning the podcast into a business. We talk about how a daily coffee order turned into a job offer and why I deliberately looked outside the legal industry for this role. Lily shares the decision she made to walk away from a place studying medicine in South Africa, move to Australia on her own and build a new life through long shifts and late night study. I also explain why I refuse to let her call any of it luck. If you are a law student or junior lawyer in the hard years and not yet sure the commitment will pay off, Lily's advice at the end is for you. ~ Download the New to In-House Survival Guide: https://www.counselpodcast.com/store/p/newtoinhouse (use code BigSisEnergy for a special discount) All of Mel's Big Sis Briefings can be found here: https://www.counselpodcast.com/big-sis-briefings Connect with Mel: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melstorey Counsel Podcast Page on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/67479008/admin/feed/posts/ Instagram & TikTok: @careerbigsis Subscribe to the Counsel Podcast so you don't miss upcoming conversations with leaders who are redefining what it means to be an in house lawyer today!

My guest this week is Courtenay, General Counsel and Company Secretary for Nando's Australia and New Zealand, and she has done something most lawyers are told never to do. She built her entire legal career in-house, starting as legal admin and working her way up, without a single day spent in private practice. We get into what it actually took to build a career that way, including the general counsel who taught her everything one on one with a red pen in hand, the friend who asked her one question that changed the direction of her career, and what it was like leading legal through the chaos of COVID in the hospitality industry. She also gets honest about being genuinely afraid of public speaking, about how long it took her to believe people who told her it gets easier, and about what it means to work for a brand that takes loud public positions on the things it cares about. You will leave this one with a clearer sense of what it actually takes to build an unconventional legal career, why knowing your limits matters more than knowing everything, and why saying yes to the things that scare you tends to pay off more than staying comfortable. ~ Download the New to In-House Survival Guide: https://www.counselpodcast.com/store/p/newtoinhouse (use code BigSisEnergy for a special discount) All of Mel's Big Sis Briefings can be found here: https://www.counselpodcast.com/big-sis-briefings Connect with Mel: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melstorey Counsel Podcast Page on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/67479008/admin/feed/posts/ Instagram & TikTok: @careerbigsis Subscribe to the Counsel Podcast so you don't miss upcoming conversations with leaders who are redefining what it means to be an in house lawyer today!

Jessica Carroll spent eight years as a litigator before a stint inside her husband's business changed how she saw the profession entirely. In this episode she talks with Mel about the winding path from courtroom advocacy to building The Brisbane Lawyer brand, moving in-house, and eventually running her own fractional legal practice. Jess gets specific about what it actually takes to build a fractional practice, from scoping engagements and pricing retainers to the scope creep that comes with being trusted enough to feel like part of the team. She also digs into why legal operations, intake forms, contract playbooks and AI adoption have become her real area of obsession, and why she started Between Council after finding fractional lawyers were often shut out of the in-house communities they used to belong to. Listeners will walk away with a clearer picture of what fractional legal work actually involves beyond the buzzword, practical thinking on where to start with legal operations improvements, and a challenge to the idea that legal needs to sit at the centre of every business decision to be valuable. ~ Download the New to In-House Survival Guide: https://www.counselpodcast.com/store/p/newtoinhouse (use code BigSisEnergy for a special discount) All of Mel's Big Sis Briefings can be found here: https://www.counselpodcast.com/big-sis-briefings Connect with Mel: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melstorey Counsel Podcast Page on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/67479008/admin/feed/posts/ Instagram & TikTok: @careerbigsis Subscribe to the Counsel Podcast so you don't miss upcoming conversations with leaders who are redefining what it means to be an in house lawyer today!

WELCOME TO THE BIG SIS TOUR ONLINE! This one's just me, sitting in my kitchen talking to over a hundred law students who logged on from Bond to Deakin and everywhere in between. I wanted to bring the tour to the people who couldn't get to a campus stop in person, and hand you the version of legal careers nobody puts in front of you in first year. I get into printing a hundred and eighty resumes and walking them around Brisbane in my mum's suit, how I landed my first job through a phone call I never saw coming, and how I stumbled into in-house law on a secondment because nobody at uni ever mentioned it existed. I also pull apart the old advice that you need years in a firm before you're allowed to go in-house, and get into why AI is something you should be learning now, not fearing. If you take one thing from this episode, I want it to be a clearer picture of what a law degree can actually do beyond the clerkship pipeline, and permission to stop waiting for someone else to tell you that you're ready. ~ Download the New to In-House Survival Guide: https://www.counselpodcast.com/store/p/newtoinhouse (use code BigSisEnergy for a special discount) All of Mel's Big Sis Briefings can be found here: https://www.counselpodcast.com/big-sis-briefings Connect with Mel: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melstorey Counsel Podcast Page on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/67479008/admin/feed/posts/ Instagram & TikTok: @careerbigsis Subscribe to the Counsel Podcast so you don't miss upcoming conversations with leaders who are redefining what it means to be an in house lawyer today!

This week I'm joined by Helen Fan, a California attorney and chief AI officer at a boutique Silicon Valley law firm, who has spent the last few years at the exact intersection of legal practice and the AI shift most of us are still trying to understand. Helen's path took her from Fangda Partners in Beijing through Columbia Law School, a legal tech hackathon, and into a Silicon Valley firm built to serve AI startup founders, where she found herself reviewing AI-drafted documents from clients who often trusted the AI more than they trusted her. We talk about her hundred day public experiment building an AI-native law firm with two agents, Morgan and Clio, who challenge and supervise each other's work, and why their disagreements turned out to be more useful than either agent working alone. Helen also makes a sharper argument than the usual billable-hour critique, pointing to the structural economics inside big law partnerships that make shared AI investment genuinely difficult, and shares why in-house adoption of AI is lagging further behind than you might expect from a function built around efficiency. You'll leave this one with a real framework for what an AI-native law firm actually means, a concrete example of how AI agents checking each other can reduce hallucination, and a provocation about what a lawyer's judgment is for once agents are doing more of the daily work. ~ Download the New to In-House Survival Guide: https://www.counselpodcast.com/store/p/newtoinhouse (use code BigSisEnergy for a special discount) All of Mel's Big Sis Briefings can be found here: https://www.counselpodcast.com/big-sis-briefings Connect with Mel: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melstorey Counsel Podcast Page on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/67479008/admin/feed/posts/ Instagram & TikTok: @careerbigsis Subscribe to the Counsel Podcast so you don't miss upcoming conversations with leaders who are redefining what it means to be an in house lawyer today!

Sarah Irwin is a former SaaS General Counsel based in Ireland who built a legal function from scratch inside a rapid scale tech company, and went on to build ITGC, one of the most recognized in-house legal communities in Europe. She joins Mel on the Counsel Podcast to talk about how a business built almost by accident, starting as a cure for loneliness in a first legal hire role, became a full time career built on in-person dinners, webinars and content. Sarah gets specific about the moments most people skip over, the cringe of her first LinkedIn post, the boss who told her to go all in before she believed it herself, and the no asshole policy that now governs every partnership her business takes on. She and Mel also get into where GCs are actually stuck in 2026, the gap between AI budget finally being assumed rather than fought for and the relentless pressure to keep upskilling that comes with it. Listeners will walk away with a genuinely useful way to think about mid career stuckness, permission to build something on the side without quitting anything, and a clear example of what it looks like to build a business on refusing to compromise on how people are treated. ~ Download the New to In-House Survival Guide: https://www.counselpodcast.com/store/p/newtoinhouse (use code BigSisEnergy for a special discount) All of Mel's Big Sis Briefings can be found here: https://www.counselpodcast.com/big-sis-briefings Connect with Mel: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melstorey Counsel Podcast Page on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/67479008/admin/feed/posts/ Instagram & TikTok: @careerbigsis Subscribe to the Counsel Podcast so you don't miss upcoming conversations with leaders who are redefining what it means to be an in house lawyer today!

This is a solo episode, which means it's just Mel, a microphone, and a year worth of things she's been wanting to say out loud. Coming up on twelve months since she walked away from a 15-year legal career to run Council Media full-time, Mel uses this episode to take stock of what that year has actually looked like, including the parts that don't make it into the highlight reel. She covers the NextGen GC Summit in Sydney, a US court decision on AI and privilege that every in-house team should be reading right now, the small business directory she accidentally built in seven days, and what she's learning about building a business that creates value when you're not physically in it. She's also honest about what taking a month off looks like when there's no salary continuing in the background. Listeners will leave with a concrete legal development to act on, a framework for thinking about the difference between surviving a career leap and building something sustainable, and the unglamorous version of year one that actually helps. ~ Download the New to In-House Survival Guide: https://www.counselpodcast.com/store/p/newtoinhouse (use code BigSisEnergy for a special discount) All of Mel's Big Sis Briefings can be found here: https://www.counselpodcast.com/big-sis-briefings Connect with Mel: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melstorey Counsel Podcast Page on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/67479008/admin/feed/posts/ Instagram & TikTok: @careerbigsis Subscribe to the Counsel Podcast so you don't miss upcoming conversations with leaders who are redefining what it means to be an in house lawyer today!

Nick Brown is the General Counsel of Airtree Ventures, one of Australia's most prominent venture capital firms, and the first lawyer to set up a legal function inside two separate businesses. He spent 15 years as an M&A lawyer before making the move in-house, and this conversation covers the full arc of how that shift actually happened and what it taught him. We get into the psychology of leaving private practice when you have been told partnership is the only acceptable destination, what the first 90 days looks like when you are building a legal function from scratch, why plain English is a mark of sophistication not simplicity, how AI is reshaping what he does without replacing what matters, and why the lawyers who struggle most in venture capital deals are the ones who bring the wrong energy to the table. You will leave this conversation with a more honest picture of how legal careers actually unfold and a clearer sense of what it means to add value as a lawyer when the people around you do not care about the law itself. ~ Download the New to In-House Survival Guide: https://www.counselpodcast.com/store/p/newtoinhouse (use code BigSisEnergy for a special discount) All of Mel's Big Sis Briefings can be found here: https://www.counselpodcast.com/big-sis-briefings Connect with Mel: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melstorey Counsel Podcast Page on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/67479008/admin/feed/posts/ Instagram & TikTok: @careerbigsis Subscribe to the Counsel Podcast so you don't miss upcoming conversations with leaders who are redefining what it means to be an in house lawyer today!

Eric Ries changed how a generation of founders think about building companies. Now, with his new book Incorruptible, he is making the case that teaching people how to build something great was only half the job, and the other half, how to protect what they built from the governance structures designed around it, is the part almost everyone skips. This conversation covers why good companies go bad by design rather than by accident, why shareholder primacy has no democratic legitimacy and is already in intellectual collapse, and what it actually means for lawyers and in-house counsel to be in the room when these structures are being built. Eric tells the Vectura story in full, and it is the kind of story that changes how you read a corporate charter. You will leave this episode with a clearer framework for what governance is actually doing, what financial gravity is doing to organisations you may be advising or working inside, and why mission primacy is not an idealistic alternative but a structurally coherent one. ~ Download the New to In-House Survival Guide: https://www.counselpodcast.com/store/p/newtoinhouse (use code BigSisEnergy for a special discount) All of Mel's Big Sis Briefings can be found here: https://www.counselpodcast.com/big-sis-briefings Connect with Mel: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melstorey Counsel Podcast Page on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/67479008/admin/feed/posts/ Instagram & TikTok: @careerbigsis Subscribe to the Counsel Podcast so you don't miss upcoming conversations with leaders who are redefining what it means to be an in house lawyer today!

Laura Frederick spent her entire career doing one thing: commercial contracts. From propane agreements to uranium trading to deals at Tesla, she said no to every GC role that would have taken her away from the work she loved, and built one of the most recognisable voices in the global contracts community along the way. This conversation covers the moment she called her boss and asked to be included in a layoff, what it actually felt like to build a solo practice as a single parent of four with eight months of savings and no plan B, and how three and a half years of daily LinkedIn posting taught her things about community, confidence and legacy that she could not have learned any other way. Laura is direct, genuinely funny, and has real opinions about what separates great contracts lawyers from good ones, why AI for contracting is overrated, and what freedom actually looks like when you stop waiting for someone to hand it to you. ~ Download the New to In-House Survival Guide: https://www.counselpodcast.com/store/p/newtoinhouse (use code BigSisEnergy for a special discount) All of Mel's Big Sis Briefings can be found here: https://www.counselpodcast.com/big-sis-briefings Connect with Mel: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melstorey Counsel Podcast Page on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/67479008/admin/feed/posts/ Instagram & TikTok: @careerbigsis Subscribe to the Counsel Podcast so you don't miss upcoming conversations with leaders who are redefining what it means to be an in house lawyer today!