At work, I am a professional problem-solver helping clients meet their business objectives and understand the law. At home, I am my family’s chief holiday travel planner and very eager, but amateur, party organiser.

Courage, inclusion, uniqueness.

It will be having the courage to think outside of the square and really test the established ideas of what we, as legal professionals, believe to be diverse thinking. The legal profession is known to be a slow moving beast and so it is no surprise that many lawyers would think of gender equality as the main pillar of diversity. This does not necessarily hold true for the for the 21st century and the future. Diversity and diverse thinking is accepting, celebrating and nurturing uniqueness of our women, men, non-binary individuals, our First Nations people, those from different cultural backgrounds and individuals of different abilities.The legal industry should embrace the many positives that this uniqueness brings to the profession and allow it to organically deliver benefits to our profession, local communities and the world. This might be an inspirational view, but every reality starts with a dream!

Practical considerations, really! I come from a family of doctors, accountants and teachers. My poor maths skills and fear of needles made me realise pretty quickly that I was never going to be our family’s next star doctor or clever accountant. This took me to considering of the alternative options of which there were not too many and so I opted for a combined degree in law and international relations.My international diplomat career never took off and so I did the diligent thing of completing my legal training and doing a summer clerkship which gave me a placement in the firm’s real estate team. I quickly fell in love with property deals, diverse real estate asset classes that we get to deal with and the ability to work on something tangible. The rest is history.