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What is Acumen Leadership?
What is Acumen Leadership?
Acumen Leadership is a place where lawyers come together to learn – to learn within and beyond the profession. What do we mean by that? As lawyers we have an annual requirement for Continuing Professional Development (CPD). The number of hours you need each year depends on your State or Territory of practice. It also depends on your speciality if you are an Accredited Specialist or mediator, arbitrator or family dispute resolution practitioner. Within those specific hours there can also be a requirement to learn about core areas of ethics, practice management and professional skills. This is all learning within the profession – that is learning about the law and its day to day application.
What about learning beyond the profession – learning beyond the legal profession is how a lawyer might find themselves attending a deep dive into a leadership program or attending an alternate (or mainstream) MBA program. It could be attending a conference for lawyers but with no sessions about the law itself but sessions relating to different experiences in law. Why would we do this? Didn’t we do enough study to get this far with our legal career? What more is there to learn? Learning beyond the profession is where the gold is. It is where we learn about others, how they engage with us and us with them. It is where we learn to think more broadly, gain a different perspective, do something differently and perhaps find a better way. It is where we get excited about learning for the same of learning.
Now we know that can sound a little nerdy but we are ok with that. Ultimately it is about having curiosity about people and things, about wanting to know more about someone or something and learning about that. Because when we know more, we gain a deep understanding about our ourselves, our teams and our law firms. We can manage ourselves and step up to manage and lead our teams and organisations. We can focus on the future and ultimately work towards a brighter future for the legal profession.
Elizabeth Fairon
Director – Acumen Leadership, Director – Life Law Solutions
Life Learning Things
Hello! I’m Elizabeth. Lovely to find you here on the pages of Acumen Leadership. Let me tell you a little about me!
In my lawland day to day I am the Legal Practice Director of Life Law Solutions. It’s a pretty cool place to work – I’ve been there since 2005. I have been the trainee solicitor, the very keen junior lawyer, the wannabe partner, a partner, and now owner. I have worked the long hours, billed my work, helped my clients, negotiated pay rises based on what I was worth, worked out what areas of law I love and do not love. It’s not always been rosy. I have learned a lot along the way, lessons I share within these pages about life, law and leadership.
Family law is my main love, in particular the role I am fortunate to do each day as an Independent Children’s Lawyer. Independent Children’s Lawyers are appointed by the Federal Circuit and Family Court in complex matters to represent the interests of children.
When I am not working in the law, I am managing our law practice alongside Legal Practice Director Nathan MacDonald. Over the years I have worked with all types of great and also difficult people, managed in and out a partnership, managed team expectations, cleaned up toxic culture, rebranded and in the process managed myself, sometimes well, sometimes poorly, finding balance, losing balance and working out my own balance.
Learning is my passion. I can often be heard saying to our team, friends and family “every day is a school day”. By this I mean we all have regular learning experiences. That desire to learn more every day lead me on a deep dive into leadership and caused me to ask the questions – what do we mean by leadership in law? Is there a place for ethics beyond the requirements of legal practice? What does doing good work look like? And how can we learn more about these areas and work towards a brighter future for the legal profession? The result of that deep dive is what you find here, Acumen Leadership.
At home on Queensland’s beautiful Sunshine Coast, I am wife to lawyer and mediation guru Fraser and mum to our two long hair Weimaraners Max and Hugo – we are working hard to give our puppies the best opportunities in life.
Formal Learning Things
I have the usual qualifications of an Australian Legal Practitioner (Admission to the Supreme Court of Queensland and the High Court of Australia, Bachelor of Laws, Graduate Diploma of Legal Practice) and was admitted as a Solicitor in 2005. I have further studies in law with a Masters in Law (QUT) and an Applied Masters in Family Law (College of Law).
There the learning in law stopped and the learning beyond the law started. The DENT (Key Person of Influence) 40 week accelerator was an eye opener. Learning from and collaborating with great minds in business taught me not only some excellent business learnings but also taught be a lot about myself, my own capabilities (and limits). The deep dive into leadership that started the leadership bug came from attending the SafeMap DeepSafe Leadership program – a program designed for safety leadership in the mining industry taught me that key leadership principles are similar across any industry and any level of employment. In 2020, at the height of the pandemic I took some time out for a sabbatical of sorts. I was about to tick over 15 years of legal practice, seemed like a good time to take some time out for me, and so I did what any person with a deep sense of curiosity and a passion for learning would do – I enrolled in and completed a 5 week intensive alternate MBA program. The altMBA created by New York based guru Seth Godin was the best learning experience I have had. An international cohort deep diving into a practical MBA about leveling up and getting your work and your voice out there.
Is there more learning on the horizon – well sure, maybe, we’ll see. I have been mulling over a PHD thesis for a while but for now Acumen is my passion, teaching, connecting, collaborating and learning. I’m going to do that for a while.
