Blanka Moss landed her first in-house role in 1985. The Schindler Lifts general counsel talks to Justin Whealing about why she has the support of senior management and how in-house lawyers have morphed from being considered soft to sexy.

Blanka Moss (pictured) laughs heartily when I call her a “senior member of the profession”.

“I will take that as a compliment,” she says.

It is. Sitting down with Moss, she has a definitive presence and a certain gravitas that goes with being a respected corporate lawyer of many years standing.

After Moss finishes laughing I argue that as a “senior member of the profession” her views concerning profession-wide issues such as diversity and depression are worth hearing.

“Lawyers should not be billing hours,” she says. “Law is a business, there has got to be a better way, and there used to be a better way.”

Moss recalls that when she first left private practice in 1985, hourly billing was starting to gain traction among law firms. She got out of the law firm environment before she personally had to fill in timesheets, and it is clear she has had no desire to go back in the intervening three decades.

“Where is the efficiency when you have to work 12 hours to bill seven?”

Moss has been the general counsel at Schindler Lifts for almost a decade.

Even though she is the company’s sole legal representative and has a role which carries a fair amount of pressure and importance, it is clear that she wouldn’t trade places with private practice colleagues any time soon.

“I went to an interview at a law firm years and years ago and I asked the question, ‘what are your normal working hours,” she says with a glint in her eye.

 “They replied that lawyers regularly work from 8am to 8pm, and I said ‘please don’t put me on the shortlist, there is something wrong if you expect people to work those hours’”. Moss didn’t stop there, recounting how the interviewing solicitor wanted to drag her out when she added that “either your firm is not allocating the work properly, the lawyers you employ are totally inefficient or you are overcharging your clients because you are billing them all these hours.”

The new legal cool

While such criticisms of law firms have been around for the duration of Moss’ career, it has only been in the last half decade or so that in-house lawyers have earned the general respect of their private practice peers.

Moss, who wryly remembers that she went in-house “before it was sexy”, recounts how colleagues once derided her for being “cocooned” and asserted that she “couldn’t hack it in the real world”.

“I would look at them and say, ‘you don’t know anything about business, I don’t do black letter law 10-hours a day,” she says.

That perception has certainly changed, with the in-house arm of the profession the fastest growing area of the Australian legal sector.

Schindler Lifts Australia, where Moss works, is part of the global Schindler Group which boasts that it transports around one billion people every day using elevators, escalators and moving walks.

And before you ask, Schindler Lifts is not a witty wordplay on the film Schindler’s List, which based on the book Schindler’s Ark by Australian novelist Thomas Keneally.

The company was founded in Lucerne Switzerland in 1874 by Robert Schindler, who was a distant relative of Oskar Schindler, whom Keneally’s book is named after.

Domestically, Schindler Lifts has an annual turnover in Australia that exceeds $330 million and employs almost 900 staff.

As the company’s sole lawyer, it is clear that Moss thrives on the variety of work her role brings.

“I am in management, I go to safety meetings, I do toolbox talks, I get asked advice on issues that have nothing to do with the law, but the managing director respects my ethical basis for making decisions and my business acumen.”

In addition to that, something else that gives Moss great satisfaction is the fact that she has the ear, and support, of senior management.

“They have always said I am their trusted adviser, they trust me completely,” she says. “I have never had a stoush where I have said ‘this is my advice and why are you not taking it’?”

In addition to being proud of her role as a trusted adviser, Moss is also chuffed that since joining Schindler Lifts in 2004, the company has not been sued.

“I do wear that as a badge of honour,” she says. “It shows our processes and procedures are correct and that we have followed them correctly.”

The kids are alright

During the course of our discussion, Moss recounts how she has balanced her career while raising three daughters with her husband, Warren.

While Inara, Lauren and Hannah are now in their 20s, there was a time when they were at school when Moss worked part-time as a university lecturer.

When seeking to return to the legal fold, she found it incredibly difficult to get a full-time job.

“Consultants wouldn’t look at me,” she says when recalling that time.

Since landing the role at Schindler Lifts, Moss has enjoyed sharing her experience and lending her expertise as a mentor to young female lawyers coming through the ranks, many of whom are the same age as her daughters now.

As opposed to some senior practitioners, Moss believes the profession is in good hands.

“Gen Y are very hard workers, and more mature than we ever were,” she says when recalling her university days in the mid to late 1970s and early forays in the law. “They are coping with the stresses of law very well, but are we asking too much of them?”