Ms Porter’s whole family are real estate agents, which is why she decided to “niche into” this particular industry — and why her LinkedIn profile states she’s The Real Estate Agent’s Lawyer.

However, before starting O*NO Legal a couple of years ago, Ms Porter worked in-house, after originally moving to Canberra to work for a medium-sized firm.

“I’ve always been drawn to business, so becoming a corporate commercial lawyer was just a really, really easy choice for me. Over time, again, just with that real love of business, I decided to go in-house so I could really understand my client’s business. I really love being in-house. I first went to Icon Water, which is Canberra’s water utility, and then ended up after that as general counsel at a large developer, and from there back into the real estate space,” she explained.

“I was general counsel for the Dexar Group, which at that time had several real estate brands. It was a house of brands. It was a really interesting role. And I had started building just some legal bots on the side, just a little side hustle. I built a bot called Pria Privacy, and she can assess whether you’ve got a privacy data breach and things like that.

“I was happy in my GC role for this real estate group. The group actually decided to refocus just back to the Canberra property market, so I helped them restructure. And I could see after the restructuring was done, they weren’t going to need an in-house legal team anymore.”

After coming to this realisation — and after speaking to her business coach, who encouraged her to “niche down”, Ms Porter decided to start her own firm, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I’ve actually heard a lot of people talk about their experience with launching law firms around about the same time, and everyone is saying it is actually the best thing that they ever did. And especially because we service clients nationally, even though we’re based in Canberra, my team is remote and distributed, and we service, we have clients in every state and territory in the country,” she quipped.

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“And what I have found that’s been helpful for firms like mine, pre-pandemic, a lot of people, especially corporates, wanted to see their lawyers and their advisors face-to-face. They wanted to come to the office, or you go to theirs. But given everyone’s used to Zoom now and seeing their advisors online, it’s actually a really good thing for businesses like mine. I almost didn’t launch, but it was probably one of the best things for my business.”

Particularly during the pandemic, newer boutique firms were arguably better placed to deal with the uptake in technology that came with COVID-19, according to Ms Porter, who said that NewLaw firms tend to be more open-minded and want to do things differently.

“We’re already cloud-based. I do have some friends in firms that were server-based, and they found that very, very hard. People were still having to go to the office, and they’re using paper and all of that,” she added.

“And I think, too, something that’s really been working for us, and I love talking about this to people because everyone has a different view, is because I have a remote and distributed team, I’ve got a few lawyers and support staff who love working from home, means our talent pool is wider. We can recruit from anywhere. And I think that does give some of these new law firms like ours an advantage because we aren’t just looking in our town or city for talent. We can go broader than that.”

And moving forward in 2023, Ms Porter said upskilling those new recruits would be vital — particularly with an upcoming holiday.

“I’ve got a seven-week Europe trip coming up later in the year, so getting the firm ready to have me away for seven weeks, that’s what’s getting me up at the moment. It’s going to be a hard slog between now and then to make sure it’s ready, as in: all our standard operating procedures are written, automations are done, all those sorts of things,” she said.

“Going to Europe, there’s going to be internet. I’ll have a laptop, but I want to be out of face-to-face client work by then. So that’s what’s exciting to me is building this practice, building up the lawyers that are coming up underneath and start really empowering them so I can then step more into a CEO role and be less on the tools. That’s exciting to me.”

The transcript of this podcast episode was slightly edited for publishing purposes. To listen to the full conversation with Kristen Porter, click below: