September 2026

Get the dust on your shoes

By David Curtain

I remember walking around a coal mine in the Latrobe Valley in a suit, getting filthy, while men who had worked there for forty years looked at me and thought: ‘You have no idea, mate’. They were right.

That was my second in-house role. The first was at grain trader AWB, which I joined two weeks before a Royal Commission was announced. Two management teams and three managing directors later, I’d learned more about how organisations actually work than in my whole law firm career.  I moved from litigation into commercial work, which meant learning soft commodities trading – shipping, rail, grain silos, traders all over the world. None of it was in my wheelhouse.

I didn’t yet know how important it is to deeply understand the people you serve. What they do. What matters to them most. What does not matter. How they like to work. And how you can best support them. Spending time on that is the most important thing an in-house lawyer can do. Everything else is secondary.

I didn’t know that early on. I’d made Senior Associate quickly and wasn’t short of confidence. Law firms are a funny little universe. Billables published on a leaderboard, everyone competing with the person next to them for the next rung. If you do well in that world, you are treated like you are somebody. Then you land in-house and discover very quickly that you are a cost centre, not a revenue earner. That is a rude awakening, and there is a detox period.

During mine, I made two mistakes worth confessing.

The first was quietly looking down on people I should have been learning from. The ops people, the sales people, the marketers. Some of them had never been to university. Some had worked their way up from the storeroom floor into very senior jobs. They understood the organisation, they knew how to mobilise people, and they got things done. It took me too long to recognise the value of that.

The second was spending my time on the wrong things. I once marked up an agreement for office supplies to within an inch of its life. It was the most inconsequential contract in the building. The vendor signed it without blinking. Meanwhile there was a COO down the corridor who could have taught me how the entire company made money, and I never went and sat with them.

What changed things was getting over myself and starting to listen. In commodities, the more time I spent with traders and people who ran the supply chain, the better I got at my job, because I understood what was important and what wasn’t. In the energy business it was the same. Refinancing deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars, a mine fire that burned for 6 weeks and a sinkhole that cut the freeway for months. The only reason I was any use is that I drove down to the mine and power station again and again and spent time with people who knew the operation inside out.

So how do you actually do that?

The best way is to have regular one-on-ones with the people running other teams. Ask them what is working, what is not, what they are not getting from you, and how things can work better.

Sitting in on other teams’ meetings can help, but passively listening in the corner of a WIP meeting is not a relationship. Fifteen minutes over a coffee, asking someone what they are actually worried about, beats hours of that.

Get out of the building. Go for a coffee, a beer, a run – whatever works. What you are building is enough trust that people tell you the truth. A salesperson will only tell you they are 20% behind budget and the burning issues keeping them awake if they trust you.

If you’re new to in-house, spend as much of your time as you can asking the key people you’re working with what they do. Aim for at least one coffee meeting  a day, and start to piece together how the organisation works.

You might say: ‘I have hundreds of emails a day and 20 meetings this week – when exactly am I doing all these coffees?’ The thing is – you may be flat out on the wrong work because you aren’t having these conversations. It doesn’t have to be a long discussion. You don’t have time not to do this. It’s the investment that makes the rest of your time worth something.

And it runs both ways. Some people carry a view of lawyers as long-winded, patronising and commercially clueless. Sometimes that’s not unreasonable, because that’s how we can come across. Time spent together dismantles that too, and they start to see that you are trying to help.

So get out there. Get the dust on your shoes. Ask what matters, listen properly to the answer, and shape your work around it.

You’ll be a much better lawyer, you’ll learn a hell of a lot and you’ll make some good friendships on the way.