The Legal 500's Guide to AUSTRALIA'S RISING STARS

Legal 500’s Guide to Australia’s Rising Stars for Legal Counsel featured founder Verity White for her role with Telstra for Telecommunication services.

Telecommunication services

Verity White is a multi-talented legal counsel within enterprise consumer contracting at Telstra, supporting large “whole of business” tenders for some of the largest Australian banks and other service providers. She is a specialist in small business transformation and is guiding the small business team through a tumultuous period of change in the market and in the organisation to open a new external sales channel and work to support and develop a brand new premier business channel for Telstra’s increasingly sophisticated small business customers.

A key area where White has made a tangible impact includes the development of a test product decision tree tool, e-advisor, designed to triage legal work through online intake and self-help tools within the consumer and small business legal team. She champions automation skills and facilitates automation and digital thinking training as crucial future skills for lawyers within Telstra. Using various processing fluency techniques, White delivers important risk advice and options in a way that gives the advice a real impact on key decision-makers during an uncertain time of change, leading to a heightened sense of value in the advice given to clients.

To ensure a ground-level understanding of the key risks of transformation and the content of agreements, she developed and facilitated interactive training sessions for internal team members. White explains how these included a gamified session about the new agreement with segments like ‘“Dude.... Where’s my clause?” to encourage the business to see how easy it is to navigate the contract and high-level overview sessions on the key risks when working with external partners. White highlights that she ‘loves being part of the legal in-house and innovation community’, and achievements she has already made include the launch of the first season of a legal podcast, “Checklist Legal” about designing contracts for automation and digital workflows; selection for the Gilbert + Tobin “Off the Island” scholarship and representing Telstra at a three-day corporate innovation masterclass in New York with global companies such as Citibank, Hershey’s, and Walmart.

Constantly at the forefront of new ideas, White has presented at the legal innovation and tech fest in Sydney about taking innovation ideas through testing and roll-out, as well as at the ACC national in-house conference in Brisbane about change management and innovation. She also finds the time to be company secretary for Melbourne social enterprise “STREAT” and digitised and streamlined its process for distributing board minutes, and it is for these reasons White is recognised as a rising star.