What was your highlight of 2024?
Personally, a highlight was a long awaited trip to Vietnam over Easter – our first long haul since before the pandemic. Such a beautiful country – I loved the food, the people and the fascinating history. Professionally, it has to be the election. It is such a privilege as a civil servant to be at the heart of supporting the government of the day at these important democratic moments for our country. It is also a great responsibility to support changes of government seamlessly (and overnight!) on behalf of our fellow citizens – upholding the impartiality of the civil service as an important constitutional safeguard. I was so proud of the way our teams across GLD exemplified that impartiality by working full tilt on the previous government’s priorities, right up until the day of the election, before welcoming incoming ministers and immediately starting work on new priorities.
What was the hardest part of being a leader in 2024?
This year has been a challenging year of elections, conflict and unrest. Being a leader supporting colleagues through turbulent times is at points distressing and complex. In wanting to ensure I, along with my senior leadership team, truly support all colleagues we have to work hard to find the right words, take time to listen to feedback and understand the actions we can take to make a tangible difference.
What are the main challenges facing your organisation in the coming year – and how are you planning to meet them?
I am keen that we continue to make progress on our GLD strategy 2024-2027: Delivering much more than law. It reflects the impact of our work on society. Doubling down on our ways of working across all our GLD teams will ensure we are delivering high quality legal services to government at the best value for money for the taxpayer.
The missions-based approach to tackling the issues facing the country plays to our strength of being able to operate and collaborate effectively across departmental boundaries, avoiding duplication and deploying the best resource in the right place. But I think there is more we need to do to support this work. That’s why we are developing a "legal operations" function within our Chief Operating Officer Group, to learn from best practice in the private sector – improving tech, knowledge-sharing and developing a genuine partnership across legal and corporate services.
What was the best Christmas present you’ve ever given or received? And the worst?
I’m going to have to make a confession on this – we don’t do presents in our house! In fact we are very often travelling overseas at Christmas, so I suppose we could count some of our amazing trips as our presents. I particularly remember a beautiful walk through Sri Lankan tea plantations on Christmas morning when it felt like we had the whole mountainside to ourselves. Heavenly.