Kate Sherburn is Legal Beagle at Who Gives a Crap in Australia. She spoke to Crafty Counsel founder Ben White in an episode of our podcast The Crafty Show. Here are some key take-aways from their conversation.
Who Gives A Crap is a Mission-based company selling good-looking, environmentally friendly toilet paper, paper towels, and tissues, and also now Dream Cloths . The company donates 50% of its profits to help build toilets for those in need.
Kate was the first in-house lawyer at Who Gives a Crap. In 2020, she was awarded new in-house lawyer of the year by the Association of Corporate Counsel in Australia. She spoke to us about balancing work and children, being the first in-house lawyer in the company, and why Kate cares about working for a mission-based organisation.
Emojis at work?
One of Kate’s favourite emojis at work is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the poop emoji 💩. “It’s somewhat appropriate in our line of work, but it’s also so versatile. You can just use it for so many things.” She also uses the celebratory emoji.
Being the first lawyer at a mission based company
Kate says it has been an interesting journey with many surprises including how receptive everyone was to “having a lawyer in the company.” She says the company had over 50 employees and most of them had not worked with lawyers before. The work environment at the company has been “the most collaborative and supportive work environment “ she’s experienced.
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She says she learns something new everyday and one of those things is how to be a better listener. “I spent a lot of time listening, working out how the best way that a legal team could be integrated into the business and then how we could do that in a way that would work best.” In doing so Kate learned so much about the business. Now, she continually asks herself questions like “will this help the business?“ and “will this help us achieve our goals?”.
Being inside a mission based company
The company is a social enterprise or a profit for purpose company. “The mission is to ensure everyone on earth has access to a toilet and safe water by 2050.”
She tells the story of how the company was created. The CEO of the company recognised that there was a great need for donations to charities that help people access clean toilets and safe water. The idea behind the company is that people would be more willing to donate if the donation is tied to a product that they have to buy anyway.
Kate says businesses have the potential to help make some serious impacts on some really big issues with this model. Kate says her role isn;t different to other in-house roles. Except that she sees “more toilet jokes, GIFs and puns than most lawyers.”
What she loves about the role is that the whole team is “working towards the same goal”. In every meeting the team remind themselves of their mission. “It means that every decision we make, contractor review, we look at it through this lens of will this help us achieve that goal?”.
Does being a lawyer make you a better parent?
For Kate there are a multitude of reasons why working as a parent makes her a better lawyer. Becoming a parent, she discovered “what we say isn’t always what’s heard. So you can repeat yourself until you’re blue in the face, but if you are talking to a child and they don’t understand what you’re saying, you’re just completely wasting your time.”
Kate says this experience has translated well into a business setting. “You have to look at things from the perspective of your audience and explain things in a way that they get. That might mean having to try multiple different ways of saying something until it lands. But you have to think about it from their point of view, not just what you are trying to get across.”
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She says that it doesn’t matter whether the advice is “spectacular, technically brilliant”, if the recipient is not able to understand that advice and therefore use it then “you may as well have not done any of that work”.
Parenthood has improved Kate’s negotiating skills and made her more patient. She says “anyone that’s spoken to a toddler can understand that”. She is also more productive. “ I look back at my time pre-kids and you could afford to waste a little bit of time, I think. Or at least I could, because I had that time to waste. Now I just don’t. I have to get on with things and I have to be present in what I’m doing, both at work and when I’m with my family.”
You can listen to Kate’s full interview with Ben on The Crafty Show podcast, where she shares more insights into working for Who Gives a Crap and balancing parenting with lawyering.