Article by: Courtenay Zajicek, Committee Member, ACC Australia Sole Legal Officer Special Interest Group
I’m the sole in-house counsel for a retail food business and spend my days juggling multiple practice areas and topics (a “jill of all trades but an expert in none”)! I’m fairly sure I’m not alone in this and that I’m not the only one who has been asked by a friend to write their will or manage their property transaction or by a colleague to give advice in a highly specialised and unfamiliar legal practice area that I haven’t looked at since uni (*cough* tax and constitution law *cough*), because all lawyers do these things, right? Wrong! So, how do we manage the expectation from others (particularly our employer) to “know all the laws” or not brief out specialist work? Spoiler alert, unfortunately I don’t have the magic answer, but if you do, please share your secret with me! Until then, I wanted to share some of the things that have helped me along the way.
