Johnny Short

Title: General Counsel

Company: Australia Transurban

How did you get into legal operations? 

I’d say it was probably through just having an interest in the area generally. We don’t have in our organization any legal operations specialists and my role amongst other things is to coordinate the Australian legal team across various different regions. Legal operations and the technologies that are out there seemed to help me in that role. I personally, and as an organization, we are still quite new to legal ops and it’s a very interesting and growing area.

When did you join CLOC? What was your main reason for joining?

We joined CLOC a couple of years ago as an organization. Having discovered an interest in legal operations generally and hearing what CLOC did, we thought it would be very useful to be a part of that. Hearing how other organizations in Australia and globally are looking at the issues and how they are addressing things with legal operations solutions. It’s been comforting to hear that many challenges we have here are replicated in other organizations in Australia. Hearing how people have addressed those is really useful.

Would you say the main challenge in your role is having to learn on the fly?

Very much so. Just keeping track of the technologies that are coming online every day and figuring out what the issues we have are and how to solve those problems. There’s a lot of work involved and is certainly challenging trying to get your hands around it and we look for external help in doing that..

What would you say to your fellow CLOC Members to become more involved in the development of the legal operations role and profession?

Perhaps there isn’t the expertise in-house as there might be in equivalent organizations in the U.S. In terms of getting the most out CLOC, you just have to participate. Try not to have everything perfect before you launch it. We are trying to be better at coming up with ideas and trialing them without polishing them. We learn once our ideas are out there whether they’re working or not which is not necessarily intuitive for lawyers who like to get everything right before it gets out in the world. I have learned from people at CLOC that we just have to learn on the go. It seems everyone is having similar problems and CLOC provides a forum for people to express themselves and find a solution.

How important do you think it is in this industry we take the risk to try new things?

I think it’s really important. We probably spent a couple of years here with a lot of very good ideas identifying issues that we had and talking about what the solutions might look like and then didn’t actually get the solutions out there. That meant that we were treading water and not achieving much. In the past 6-12 months, we have come up with some solutions for specific problems and worked closely with our technology team and we’ve been braver by putting them out into our business which has brought back great feedback. We wouldn’t have had that if we had held back until it was perfect. There is no doubt that we have to put aside some of our natural lawyer instincts and be a bit more innovative.

There’s some comfort in knowing we aren’t alone and perhaps as far behind the curve as we may think we are. Absolutely having people who are further down the curve sharing what has, and just as importantly, what hasn’t worked for them is useful for us. It has been a very valuable forum for us and I have managed to get other people from my team involved and we all get a lot out of it.