Life as a non-firm lawyer in London has ‘great payoffs’

When the global financial crisis kiboshed Claire Anderson’s plans to join the Metropolitan Police in London, the Irish-Australian jumped on a plane to Sydney and enrolled in a Juris Doctor.

At UNSW, students were preoccupied with securing clerkships at swish city firms – a far cry from Anderson’s experience policing the Tottenham area as a volunteer constable. Commercial law “was of no interest to me at all”, she says.

Uninterested in trading tedium for a high rate of pay at a corporate law firm, Anderson cast her CV around public service agencies, landing a job at the NSW Police Integrity Commission (now known as the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission), quickly graduating from photocopying to phone interceptions.

“We would monitor calls and write up transcripts to support investigations into serious misconduct in the police force – I was absolutely hooked.

“The opportunities that you get to do those sorts of things in Australia are so good. People will give you a go if you seem sensible, motivated and interested in how the agencies work,” she says.

After a decade in Australia, including stints with Legal Aid working on the Curtis Cheng case and at the Australian Federal Police working on criminal assets confiscations – “where we take the big yachts off the naughty drug dealers” – Anderson headed for London to be nearer family in Northern Ireland.

Anderson took a job in the Ministry of Justice’s legal department, advising on cases involving the release of serious offenders. Leading the Dangerous and Specific Offenders unit with the larger Offender Management Unit, Anderson’s mini-team advises on the imprisonment and release of terrorist offenders and those detained under mental health legislation.

With experience helping to draft emergency legislation in the wake of the 2019 London Bridge attack, Anderson’s work also includes advising the government on challenges to the exercise of powers that prevent the automatic release of certain dangerous offenders.

“I get real meaning from doing something that impacts everybody. This type of work affects everybody and it’s about people. The offenders are people and the victims are people,” Anderson says.

“I find it really interesting to be able to say that what I did today had a real-world impact. Corporate law has just never been my jam.”

While the pay doesn’t compare to that on offer at the commercial firms, Anderson says a new pay deal and generous pension arrangements help compensate for the high volume of work and London’s notorious cost of living.

“You can’t finish here at 4.30 and go to the beach, but there are great payoffs. It’s expensive to live and costs are going up. But the same is happening in Australia,” she says. “They really try to offer as many benefits as they can.”

While a stint in the UK is a rite of passage for Australian corporate lawyers, Anderson says lawyers with public sector experience are also making a mark in London.

“A huge contingent of the Government Legal Department are Australian qualified lawyers. We’ve got absolutely loads of Australians.”

The travel opportunities and cultural life on offer in London far outstrip that on offer in Australia, she says, with the opportunity to take weekend international holidays and see the world’s top theatre shows and music acts week in and week out.

But one thing is missing – “If you could move the weather over here, that’d be great”.

Catherine Hinwood can pinpoint the day she learned what she wanted to do with her life.

She was a high schooler attending the Blacktown courthouse during a stint interning at a local legal aid centre. Hinwood, a young woman with a passion for justice, was concerned about an over-representation of Indigenous people in the courthouse on minor charges and made up her mind that she wanted to pursue law.

She ended up studying at UTS, and later landed a job as a legal officer at the Australian Human Rights Commission working on anti-discrimation cases.

She found her attention being drawn to the UK, where she felt the laws and jurisprudence around the issues she was working on were more sophisticated. Her mother was a British national, so the idea of exploring the UK was already in the back of her mind.

Hinwood sat a conversion exam to requalify in the UK, and says at the time it was simpler, and mainly focused on ethics and accounting. The re-qualification exams have changed several times since then, but are expected to relax under a free trade agreement between Australia and the UK.

She became one of the many Australian lawyers moving to London, but she wasn’t chasing Magic Circle money. She was working as a legal officer with a refugee legal centre, which brought her attention to trafficking and women’s rights.

“I was really touched by a case that I dealt with, with a young Iranian girl who was being forced into marriage at a very young age,” says Hinwood. “It made me think a lot about the experiences of women.” The two of them are still in touch today.

Hinwood realised she wanted to develop the law as well as apply it, and took a job as an advisor to the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal, which was later absorbed into the Ministry of Justice. From there, she began transitioning toward a career in policy development and reform, and spent over a decade working at the UK Ministry of Justice.

She now works at the British National Health Service (NHS) as the programme director, developing policy for domestic abuse and sexual violence.

Changing the UK

Since her move, Hinwood has taken on a range of high-profile projects in the UK, but she has a few favourites.

At the Ministry of Justice, she led the introduction of the first sexual harassment policies in the public sector, and coordinated support funding for domestic violence and sexual violence services during COVID.

“We were able to get 50 million pounds out to support services in the first months of COVID,” she says.

During the pandemic, she worked 80 hours a week to deliver an extra £51 million ($98,079,223) of funding for rape and domestic abuse support services in 2021/22. The project was especially meaningful to her as the daughter of a domestic violence survivor.

In 2023, she received the Order of the British Empire from King Charles for her work.

Life outside of work

Outside of work, Hinwood says that London has an excellent jazz music scene, and she enjoys relaxing at a local jazz bar at the end of her street. The ease of travel in Europe means that she has access to art and culture events like the Venice Biennale and jazz festivals in Senegal.

Although she has put down deep roots in the UK, she stays connected to Australia. She has become an adjunct fellow at her alma mater, UTS, to bring the experience she gained overseas back home to Australia.

Hanging in her living room in London is a painting called ‘Women’s Business’ by Australian artist Merryn Apma.

“It is the pride and joy of my home and keeps me thinking about Australia,” says Hinwood. “To have that looking down on my community of women is so special.”

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Sydney litigator Cassidy O’Sullivan didn’t move to Los Angeles to pursue a career in acting, but in Tinseltown, everyone is in showbiz.

Due to the ubiquity of jury trials in the United States, American firms often hire actors as mock jurors to rehearse and workshop real cases before they go to trial. It was one aspect of working in the US that O’Sullivan didn’t expect – but she rolled with it.

As a result, her court presentation style has evolved to include more visual and theatrical elements to better connect with jurors from all walks of life.

“Having to explain concepts to a jury and think about themes and concepts that would resonate with them really just permeates everything you do in preparing a case,” says O’Sullivan.

In her associate role at litigation firm Hueston Hennigan she has been exposed to a large array of subjects and cases, from media, tech and trade secrets to white-collar crime and even pro bono civil rights cases about police profiling in the American South.

Remuneration

Major US law firms decide pay based on the Cravath Scale, which is significantly more lucrative than the typical Australian lawyer’s salary. At three years’ post-qualified experience, lawyers can expect to earn $US260,000 ($400,665) with big bonuses around $US57,500.

But requalifying in the United States can be expensive. Each state has its own bar exam, and the fees to qualify in California amount to thousands of dollars. Nevertheless, without the full burden of American college loans, early career Australians can still take even more money home than their colleagues.

Additionally, O’Sullivan and her colleagues are given a “generous” business development budget to network and raise the professional profile of themselves and the firm.

Law firm work also includes more lifestyle elements in the US. Her firm hosts many social events that include significant others, so employees can get to know each other more personally, and does annual overnight retreats.

Despite the many financial benefits of practising in the US, O’Sullivan really moved for love. She met a Californian man while visiting a friend in Los Angeles and maintained a long-distance relationship with him while she was studying at NYU, before moving across the country to join him – and now they are married.

Networking is critical

Breaking into the California market can be tough, according to O’Sullivan. Expats who have worked as lawyers in the US emphasise how critical active networking is to getting a job as a foreign-trained lawyer.

“I think that could not be more accurate, especially in LA,” O’Sullivan says. “They aren’t really familiar with the LLM market, and they don’t know much about Australian lawyers and what you would have to offer them compared to an American JD candidate.”

To combat the disadvantage, she drew on every connection she had, reaching out to old law school contacts and chasing second-degree connections.

“The most helpful path was through professors that I had at NYU, making an effort to get to know them, and then telling them that my goal was practising in LA.”

She ended up getting her current associate role at litigation firm Hueston Hennigan through a chain of connections from her former government and anti-corruption clinic professor.

Socialising in the city

When O’Sullivan first moved, she wasn’t sure she was going to like Los Angeles. However, the city has fully won her over. With mountains to the north and the beach to the west, there are plenty of options to get out into nature, and O’Sullivan has become a habitual hiker and swimmer. There is a decent-sized Australian expat community there, and the live music scene is top tier.

The people-watching is next level, too. Though she claims to be “pretty bad at noticing celebrities”, O’Sullivan has run into Justin and Hailey Bieber getting sushi and she has dined at a table next to Adam Sandler.

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Sydneysider Katsu Saikawa had always been interested in living overseas.

As a student at UTS, he signed up for international studies in addition to law so he could pursue travel.

He spoke Japanese at home with his parents, and the city of Yokohama in Japan became a natural destination for his 10-month exchange program.

He returned to Sydney to complete his degree, and later his masters of laws at the University of Sydney, where he met overseas lawyers who reignited his itch to travel.

A US firm in Japan

In 2019, when he was 33, he landed an associate position (with a focus on M&A) at the Tokyo office of firm Greenberg Traurig.

The US firm exposed him to an array of international legal projects.

Working with partners in Las Vegas meant deals involving casinos and resorts, while projects for Los Angeles clients involved more entertainment industry and intellectual property cases. New York clients typically meant dealing with equities.

In 2021, he took an associate role with Japanese firm Anderson Mori & Tomotsune.

Workplace culture

Japan has a strong workplace culture of seniority, which was a big change for Saikawa. Japanese people are very reserved, and junior employees rarely express opinions directly.

Clients and colleagues would express views so subtly, they would go over his head.

“Despite my appearance, I’m very much Aussie” says Saikawa. “When I moved to Japan there was a lot of confusion.”

He says international qualifications are also taken as a sign of diligence and commitment, and from his experience, different overseas qualifications signal expertise in certain legal fields.

“If you’re qualified in New York, then you are more likely to be in M&A, and if you have UK qualifications, you’re likely in project finance.”

Industry differences

There are also major structural differences in how the legal industry operates.

In Australia, lawyers are typically employees of a firm, while Japanese firms consider them independent contractors.

This is because it is so hard to fire people in Japan and to minimise overtime pay, Saikawa says.

“On average, lawyers here work 300 to 350 hours a month,” he says. “But I’ve heard some Japanese lawyers work 500 hours a month.”

He hasn’t had to pull hours like that himself.

Saikawa typically works 200 billable hours per month, and says his colleagues take his Australian background into account when calibrating their expectations.

That said, after-work dinners are common, and his firm has at least one outing for dinner or drinks per month for employees to let their hair down and socialise.

Games over

Living in such an urban area has some downsides.

“I used to play golf and tennis over the weekend,” Saikawa laments.

The city lacks the sporting facilities, so he’s had to give up his games. However, his weekends remain active.

Saikawa met his partner, Mafumi, during his time working in Tokyo, and they now have a daughter.

“I get to play with my daughter in the park.” he says. “That’s my new hobby.”

The country offers easier access to other East Asian countries for travel, but he enjoys the local attractions such as the fish markets and Tokyo Tower.

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Vinay Orekondy cut his teeth in Australian politics. He spent his early career as a legal researcher as well as working with various unions, not-for-profits and a couple of small progressive parties.

In his early thirties, he made the leap across the ocean to the big leagues in the United States, and joined the 2020 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign as a field organiser.

But at the end of the campaign, Orekondy found himself growing tired of the “toxic” culture of US politics and campaigning.

“I realised I just didn’t have enough rage in me to continue working in politics,” says Orekondy. “US politics felt like just pouring rage into the rage mill. And you hope that if you pour in enough rage, you’ll win.”

After the campaign ended, Orekondy left to sit the Vermont bar exam. However, instead of running off to chase big American law firm money, his combined interest in law and politics lead him down a different path.

He realised that his experience with Australian politics and preference negotiation gave him a perspective that would be incredibly valuable to the ranked choice voting (RCV) movement – a proposed reform that would give voters the opportunity to rank electoral candidates on a ballot from favourite to least favourite – as is done in Australia – rather than just voting for a single person. It is a proposed democratic reform rapidly gaining favour in the US.

But, of course, there is plenty of opposition to the idea.

“What you start to see is these entrenched interests. America has a lot of one-party states, and the more entrenched a party is, the more likely they are to oppose RCV,” says Orekondy.

“The arguments that get raised are so bizarre to us as Australians. I’ve been told by left-wingers that it’ll help the right. I’ve been told by right-wingers it’ll help the left.

“I’ve heard it being called racist. I don’t know how they work that out.”

The DC lifestyle

Orekondy now lives in Washington DC, where he works as coalitions director and national organiser for Rank the Vote. He sees the city as divided against itself, with a big gulf between the people born and raised there, and the transplants.

Orekondy ended up in the city after he won the US Green Card Lottery, a program that raffles off green cards to citizens of countries with low numbers of immigration to the US. He had entered himself early on in his time there, and lost, and decided to forget the possibility.

However, his dad had been quietly entering his name in the US green card lottery for years, and when he won, his mother thought the call was from a scammer.

He says it can feel like a small town in the same way Canberra can in Australia.

“You just run into high-profile people here. Being Australian, where we’re not into taking anyone or anything too seriously, has greatly benefited me. The less starstruck you are, the better.”

Remaking America

When he isn’t actively working on campaigns, the hours are reasonable, the type you would expect in the Australian not-for-profit industry.

But when a campaign kicks off, the hours become “infinite”. He says that in the US, long hours are more normalised, due to campaigns being “much more competitive”.

Despite the long hours and a pay scale that is lower than the sky-high rates big New York firms attract, Orekondy claims he couldn’t be happier. The work is stimulating and meaningful, and he gets to observe America up close.

Work-life balance

In particular, he enjoys observing the country’s natural beauty, which he says was one of the most surprising things about his move.

“I drove through the country, not expecting it to be that good through Wyoming or Idaho, but the beauty is just something else,” he says.

The competitive, individualistic culture was also a shock.

“It’s, like, why is everyone like trying so hard? It’s just a cultural trait.” he says. “Americans need to distinguish themselves from everyone else somehow.”

In his work, he sees many Americans searching for an answer to their country.

“I’m actually very optimistic about the US,” says Orekondy. “There’s a real yearning to form community as the answer to that hyper-individualism.”

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Six years ago, Kedar Vishwanathan was a paralegal at Colin Biggers & Paisley in Sydney.

This year, he found himself in an LA courtroom, taking on a lawyer well-known for his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election result in a case brought by hardline Republicans Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz over the cancellation of a rally in LA by city authorities.

Vishwanathan says practising law in the United States – where there is no distinction between the legal classes – is a far more intellectually stimulating exercise than in Australia.

“The fact there’s no barristers, and you can argue as an attorney without the two-tier system, appeals to me a lot,” he says.

Landing a job with connections

With a PhD in Indian modernist aesthetics and a Juris Doctor in his back pocket, Vishwanathan arrived in LA two weeks before the pandemic lockdown with his filmmaker wife Kylie Stott.

Enrolling remotely in a master of laws at Columbia University, Vishwanathan struck up a friendship with law professor Akhil Amar, who bounced a job at an LA firm his way.

Connections with legal academics form an important part of the States’ more informal legal recruitment pathways, Vishawanathan says. “If you do well and impress your professor, they’ll hook you with their own network.”

Vishwanathan settled at boutique firm Andrade Gonzalez, where a range of matters from commercial disputes to politically significant litigation comes across his desk.

The differences between NYC and LA

Compared to New York, where lawyers are hothoused in large establishment firms, Vishwanathan says LA’s legal industry has a different feel.

“You’re working with a very diverse crowd, where minorities are flourishing, so it’s quite different from anywhere I’ve worked.

“There’s definitely a West Coast feel. It’s a little more subdued. People still work very hard, and the work is of a high quality, but people can sometimes be larger than life – it can be like being in a film,” he says.

Vishwanathan and Stott moved to Santa Monica from the more bohemian Los Feliz so their son could “run around and go feral on the beach”. But despite the West Coast vibes, billable hours mean life isn’t quite a beach for the litigation specialist.

“In litigation, you have times when you’re not doing much and times when you’re very busy. Sometimes I get up to 70 hours per week, and you get about 2000 hours annually quite easily. It would be unusual not to.”

Top-tier Australian firms generally expect lawyers to bill around 1700 hours per year.

Like the hours, pay is lower in LA than in New York, but still outstrips that on offer in Australia. “Pay is always a lot higher [in the United States]. The top of the market pay in LA is similar to New York, but there is a much faster drop off.”

A relatively junior LA litigator at a respected firm would find themselves earning a similar amount to a top-tier junior partner or senior associate in Sydney, Vishwanathan estimates.

Life in LA

In those quieter times, Vishawanathan finds himself at rock gigs, comedy shows or “walking around LA with a kid in a backpack”.

Beachside Santa Monica has “more of a Sydney feel”, he says, but the sheer size of LA – the greater metropolitan area is home to 18 million people – means there are always things to do and places to see.

“There are so many different cities in the one city. It’s like an extra dimension of Sydney.”

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When Melbourne-born James Frixou landed a job in Stockholm, his colleagues were confused. Sweden isn’t a common professional destination, and Australians are not known for their fondness of frigid Scandinavian weather. But when he told them his story, it all made sense.

Frixou had met a Swedish woman in Melbourne in 2014. A romance soon developed, and the next year he left his mid-tier firm to follow her back to her home when she left Australia to finish her degree.

He arrived with no plan and no job lined up.

“I pretty much door-knocked every banking and finance practice in Stockholm,” he says.

Eventually, he landed an associate role filling in for an employee on maternity leave at Advokatfirman Lindahl, practising in cross-border, leveraged finance, and corporate financing, before moving to Ashurst Stockholm.

His story wasn’t unfamiliar to his Swedish colleagues. Expats moving to Sweden in pursuit of love is such a common phenomenon the Swedes have a term for it: “Swedish love refugees”.

One such “love refugee” calls it a “Swedish conspiracy of sending cute Swedes around the globe to fool foreign men and women to fall in love with them and move here”.

Life in a Swedish office

During his time in Sweden, Frixou encountered some notable differences within the workplace.

He found that Swedish lawyers have more of a work-life balance than Australians, and had even started implementing flexible work-from-home policies in the mid-2010s, long before the pandemic forced the rest of the world to reckon with it.

In the office, he enjoyed partaking in fika, the culturally mandated coffee break Swedish workers and friends take together daily. Frixou says his firm congregated to take fika every two or three hours.

Frixou claims all the coffee and snacking didn’t impede worker productivity. In fact, he feels that it improved it. He credits Swedish lawyers’ productivity to the flexible working conditions that boost worker morale and trust within firms. He claims that Swedish lawyers are some of the most efficient workers he’s ever come across.

His Swedish coworkers warmed up to him very quickly, and he enjoyed the novelty of being one of the few Australians working in the Swedish legal industry at the time.

“People found it so fascinating that they just really wanted to be friends,” says Frixou. “People perceive Scandinavians as a bit cold. That’s definitely not the case. They’re very warm people. And once you make a friend, they are a friend for life.”

Life after love

Frixou stayed in Sweden for about a year and a half before the relationship broke down. At that point, he moved to London with Ashurst, where he was paid very well and worked very long hours.

Frixou found Swedish firms pay salaries almost in the same range as Australian firms (the median salary ranged from $90,000-$105,000 per annum last year), but living expenses were lower because firms subsidise many aspects of life such as health insurance. Although he got paid more once he moved to London, the high cost of living in the UK capital diminished the sum.

As always, one of the most enjoyable parts of living in Europe is the ease and affordability of intra-EU travel. Frixou took advantage of the travel opportunities to pursue skiing, which he says was his “number one hobby” during his time in Europe. He is partial to the slopes in the north of Italy.

He is now back in Melbourne working at Gilbert + Tobin.

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Jennifer Darmody felt “disappointed” by her experience working at top-tier law firm King & Wood Mallesons, so she became a professional cyclist, picked up a Fulbright scholarship and got a gig at one of New York’s top law firms, where the work is fulfilling and the pay “ridiculous”.

While the litigator now finds herself often working to midnight at American law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, Darmody says the hours aren’t an issue if there is important and worthwhile work to be done, and lawyers are trusted to design their own schedules.

She says that in Australia young lawyers often labour under an expectation that they show their face in the office as long as partners are around.

Darmody says: “We often go straight from law school to big law firms, and we very quickly lose what we value because we’ve made so many sacrifices to be there.”

Picking up cycling again after arriving in the United States, Darmody raced for a professional team based in Boston. “It gave me a moment to pause and reflect in some key areas, both professionally and personally, and taught me to value balance”.

Studying at Columbia

Witnessing discrimination of transgender athletes, and frustrated at the inequality between men’s and women’s sports, Darmody enrolled in a Masters of Law at the Ivy League Columbia University.

“My focus at Columbia was to challenge myself and to do things that would help me evolve as a lawyer. So I focused on those areas of the law that would allow me to expand and work in a range of areas that I would find both challenging and fulfilling. I studied civil rights, human rights and anti-discrimination law and worked at the Centre for Sport and Human Rights”.

“A big difference with Australia is that you have flexibility to build a practice that suits your interests. At the big firms, partners often have pro bono practices, which is a really big focus here. And associates are encouraged to build their skills and focus on areas alongside their commercial cases that they find personally fulfilling,” she says.

Darmody landed at Paul, Weiss, turning down firms that hinted her cycling wouldn’t be compatible with a white-shoe lifestyle.

The firm offers “an incredible mix of work”, she says, spanning competition cases and commercial disputes, while branching out into criminal investigations and pro bono cases.

“I can’t emphasise enough how great the contrast is with the model and culture of big firms in Australia.”

Differences between Australia and the US

The scale of firms allows tedious tasks normally assigned to juniors in Australia – namely document review and discovery – to be farmed out to specialists, while the flat structure of the American legal profession – there is no distinction between barristers and solicitors – makes the work more varied and engaging.

Darmody says she works very hard at the firm, but on her own schedule. “No one cares where you are or where you’re working because they trust you will get the work done”. That self-driven culture goes further – there are no official billable hours targets at the firm, either.

“They know you’ll put in the billable hours because there’s just so much work to do. It’s very easy to bill 10 hours a day,” Darmody says. “That’s a big difference with Australia, where it often felt like a challenge to reach your billable target.”

Living in New York is amazing, Darmody says: “it’s really the city that never sleeps”. Which is just as well, because she finds herself working late most nights.

As for her income, she’s embarrassed to say. “It’s a ridiculous amount of money compared to what an associate would be paid in Australia”. White-shoe firms (prestigious professional services firms associated with graduates from Ivy League colleges) pay according to the widely available Cravath scale.

According to the scale, a second-year litigant would earn almost $A400,000.

This article has been amended since publication.

Tess Lambourne took the long route from Melbourne to Sydney.

A Melbourne local, she moved overseas in 2010 to Cambodia in her late 20s. Her father had worked on the railways there in the past and that led her to volunteer for a few weeks at American-owned law firm Gordon & Associates, which turned into a two-year job.

By 2012, she was looking to find new work in a country with more English language practice, but still off the beaten Western track. She had her eye on Pakistan.

“I wrote to the top three firms [in Pakistan] and one of them wrote back within a couple of hours. The senior partner was going to Vietnam that weekend and asked if I could meet him there,” she says. She hopped on her motorbike and had a visa from the Vietnamese embassy before the day was out, and received a job offer over coffee in Ho Chi Minh City a few days later.

She lived in Pakistan for a year in 2012, working for RIAA Barker Gillette as a senior associate, with a focus on real estate and contracts.

Life in Pakistan

Her lived experience there was different to what she saw on the Australian news.

“Pakistanis get such a bad rap from the politicians and the media,” says Lambourne. “They miss that there’s this really vibrant, educated, fun, middle class of people. There are women doing carpentry courses in the middle of nowhere. It’s a great place for domestic travel.”

The Pakistani TV program Coke Studio showed her a dynamic music scene she had never considered, and in her year working in Islamabad she met local fashionistas, dancers and award-winning animators.

She found being a woman in the Pakistani workforce to be much easier than she expected, though outside the office it could be challenging. She got stares in the street, and it was difficult to rent a flat as a single woman.

“You’d sort of be in a granny flat at the back of a family home,” says Lambourne. “Mobility was hard because you could drive a car, but women didn’t tend to.”

Nippers in Dubai

She eventually took a job in Dubai with her current employer, commercial real estate company CBRE. The firm supported her decision to sit the New York bar exam while there, which she studied for with podcast lessons while she was working full time. She and her kids also became involved in the Dubai branch of the Nippers program, run by an Australian expat.

She says that of all the countries she’s worked in, Dubai offered the most attractive pay packet (lawyers can earn $195,000 to $280,000 at five years PQE), especially considering the money was tax-free. However, Dubai was also where she says she worked the longest hours.

After 10 years in Dubai, Lambourne decided to return to Australia, this time to Sydney. Professionally, she found the move easily manageable, as she remained part of the same company she was working for in the UAE, CBRE. But the administration of moving home has been in some ways harder than moving overseas, and Sydney house prices have also come as a nasty shock.

Lambourne says her international experience has given her more confidence to work with a broader array of people from all different backgrounds. She also stays connected with some of her past employers. Today she is still working pro bono with former boss Brad Gordon, and the Cambodian Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts to help recover stolen Cambodian antiquities from foreign private collections around the world.

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Growing up in Washington DC, Sydneysider and insolvency law specialist Harry Lawless had harboured ambitions of returning to the United States to work.

With a Capitol Hill internship under his belt, big firm experience, and the notoriously difficult New York Bar behind him, a big-billing Wall Street career beckoned.

But soon after his big bar success, while applying for positions at New York firms, Lawless found himself confined to his home by the pandemic and taking Zoom calls in his room at 3am – a situation he “wouldn’t recommend as a career”.

The unusual hours weren’t a product of a tyrannical partner, but rather in service of a career change from corporate law to policy work for large intergovernmental organisations.

Lawless’ firm, Norton Rose Fulbright, had offered him a short-term secondment with the World Bank – a big shift from his previous gig as a solicitor assisting the NSW government’s inquiry into Crown Resorts.

The pandemic-era secondment, “pitched as a short-term position to just contribute to a report”, resulted in work on a few more projects, and ultimately “snowballed into a full-time position” at the World Bank’s Washington DC headquarters two years ago.

While insolvency law isn’t typically the pathway to a captivating career, the two years since have seen Lawless shepherded around the globe, advising governments in Ghana, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka and Fiji, among others, on reforms to their insolvency statute books.

Lawless says the role’s combination of legal and policy aspects allows him to exercise his legal brain on “intellectually demanding” issues, while learning to “speak plain English” in ensuring that his technical expertise is understood by non-legal colleagues – the Bank is 70 per cent economists – and advice is communicated effectively to governments.

The shift from corporate law “has certainly given me a broader perspective”, says Lawless, who finds himself working across legal systems with colleagues from around the globe.

Broadened perspectives are one thing, but the pace of life at an intergovernmental organisation is another plus compared to the long hours of corporate law. “You’re working on longer-term projects, so there’s less of those frantic scrambles the night before a deadline. It’s far more methodical, so you can plan and deliver everything over the course of the year,” Lawless says.

Tax-free pay

While the global nature of the work can mean occasionally jumping on calls at unusual hours, the shift out of private practice hasn’t come with the usual accompanying dip in pay.

“Compared to working in a big American firm, it would be a big pay cut – but the pay is pretty similar to my experience level at an Australian firm. Especially because the exchange rate is pretty good at the moment … and it’s tax-free.”

Lawless says Washington DC is an attractive city “for many different kinds of people”, not just those obsessed with policy and politics. The city’s nature and nightlife have far exceeded expectations, he says, and, as a city of expats – both international and domestic – it’s easy to make friends.

And working a three-minute walk from the White House “definitely doesn’t get old”, he adds.

Are you an Australian lawyer overseas? If you’d like to share your story, email explainers@afr.com