Nureen Shariff

At Toll, I’d been doing the legal thing for about six years and I was getting a little antsy. Sustainability was becoming a big topic, so I put my hand up and asked how I could get involved. I started a sustainability working group in the Global Forwarding business, looking at things like biofuels, sustainable aviation fuel and how we engaged with customers. We dabbled in it, really.

That eventually led to a full-time secondment into sustainability that was meant to last a year and became two. Part of the attraction for me was that I knew it would stretch me in ways that staying in legal probably wouldn’t. It would give me broader exposure to senior decision-making, develop my ability to influence across the organisation, and help me to understand what it was like to actually own and deliver something operationally rather than advise on it.

There were definitely things I brought with me from legal that were really useful. One was being able to take a very broad, complex problem and give it some structure. The other was rigour: thinking about evidence, governance, where things might be challenged and making sure what we were doing could stand up to scrutiny.

That helped a lot when we were building our emissions data capability. My mindset was: we need to get this right, we can’t afford an adverse audit finding. Knowing what auditors and regulators look for made a real difference.

But what I learnt going the other way was probably more interesting.

Sustainability taught me to influence without authority in a very different way. When you’re trying to decarbonise a transport business, you need fleet, property and individual businesses to change things. You can’t always point to a legal requirement and say “we have to do this”. You have to bring people with you. You don’t necessarily control their decisions or their resources. You have to understand their constraints and work out what will actually move them.

It also reinforced that having the right answer isn’t enough. You can have a brilliant decarbonisation pathway, but if nobody is acting on it, it’s just a piece of paper. As a lawyer, I already knew that communication mattered: you have to translate complexity into why it matters and what someone needs to do. But having sat on the operational side, I now understand much better what I’m translating it into: competing priorities, commercial realities and decisions that are rarely made through a purely legal lens.

Looking back, I don’t really see those two years as stepping away from legal. I think they gave me an operational lens that has made me a much better in-house lawyer.

It did. One thing I found interesting was seeing the breadth of the role legal actually plays from the outside. Environmental compliance sat under sustainability, so I had a lot of interaction with the legal team. I saw them acting not just as advisers, but as project managers and strategists as well.

But probably the bigger lesson was experiencing legal as an internal client. We had built and automated a legal process and I’d always heard parts of the business complain about it. When I was in the Legal team I’d think, “well, you don’t know how much better this is than what we had before”. Then I had to use it myself and I started to think “actually, this bit’s confusing” or “this bit’s clunky” or “why do I have to do this?”

It gave me much more empathy for the user of a legal process. Legal wants information because we need it to assess the risk properly. The business is thinking “I just need to get this done”. Neither is wrong. The challenge is designing legal processes that satisfy both. I came back to Legal with quite a few ideas about what we could improve, simply because I experienced it from the other side.

I think it depends on what you want to do, but if you want to be an effective in-house lawyer, I think there’s enormous value in spending time actually owning a business problem.

One example: I thought I had a brilliant plan for procuring green energy, and at the enterprise level it absolutely made sense. But when you got down to the particular business that actually had to implement it and looked at their incentives, priorities and resourcing, the answer was much less straightforward.

That experience taught me to ask not just “is this the right answer?” but “is this an answer that will actually work?” You see much more directly how businesses prioritise when there are several perfectly good things they could do and limited resources to do them.

You also learn things you never thought you would. I can now speak tech: I know what a UAT environment is, what dev is, what prod is. That was honestly one of the toughest parts of the job, because it was all new to me.

I also became much more comfortable thinking in terms of return on investment and organisational design.

For me, that time away from legal was incredibly useful for building judgment because it gave me another perspective from which to test my legal advice.

A little. You can understand ROI conceptually in Legal, whereas on the business side you’re actually living the trade-offs. You see much more directly how decisions are prioritised. Something that can look perfect on paper may still not be the thing that gets done, because the business has other pressures or priorities at that point. Seeing how those decisions actually get made was eye-opening.

I thought I was just going to be looking at contracts. That’s what lawyers do, right? And yes, there was a lot of contracting work, but I realised quite quickly that being in-house was so much broader than that. Almost every business decision has some legal element to it: tax, entering or exiting a market, employment, supply chain, regulatory issues. You get exposed to the whole gamut.

What I probably got wrong was thinking that my job was to provide the best legal answer. I came to understand that the job is really to help the business achieve what it’s trying to achieve, while identifying and managing the risks that could get in the way.

So what becomes really important is working out where Legal can actually add value. I could have a legal view on almost everything, but that doesn’t mean I should be involved in everything. What is the business trying to achieve? What could get in the way? And how can Legal help?

Then there’s how you advise the business. I think when I first went in-house, my instinct was: this is the law, this is what the best contract looks like, and here’s my answer. But good in-house advice has to start with what the business is trying to achieve and the person you’re advising.

One thing I tell younger lawyers coming in-house is that once you have your legal answer, stop and think about who you’re talking to. If you’re talking to the CFO, what are they really interested in? If it’s the head of HR, what do they need from you? You may have exactly the same underlying issue, but how you frame the advice and what you emphasise can be very different. That doesn’t mean changing the legal answer. It means making the advice useful to the person who has to make the decision.

So I went in thinking I’d be looking at contracts and giving legal answers, and fairly quickly realised the role was much broader than that. Sometimes I was an adviser, sometimes a strategist, sometimes a hand-holder and sometimes a challenger. In-house counsel wear many hats and the role is much bigger than just knowing the law.

I was extremely fortunate to have some really great mentors when I started in-house. But interestingly, the most valuable mentoring wasn’t someone sitting down and teaching me how to mark up a contract.

A lot of it was observation. One of the best things you can do is sit quietly on a call with someone who is really good at what they do and watch them. How do they communicate the advice? When do they push and when do they step back? How do they read the room? How do they make the advice land with that particular person?

I also learned a lot from asking questions. The best advice I was given when I moved in-house was simply to ask lots of them. There really is no stupid question when you’re trying to understand a business. Ask why they do something that way. Ask what happens operationally if you give a particular piece of advice.

The curiosity is how you start building context around the law, and I think a lot of judgment comes from that context.

Almost 19 years.

The first is resilience. It is not easy moving to another country and trying to build something again. There are knockbacks, and it can be soul-destroying at times. You just learn to keep going.

It teaches you flexibility and adaptability. If I’d had a rigid career path in mind, I would never be where I am. You have to be willing to speak to people, explore opportunities and be curious about what else is out there. That sustainability secondment is a good example. It started with curiosity, really: I’m interested in this, can I get involved? And it grew from there.

Then there’s the appreciation for different ways of doing things. What works in one country may not work in another. Communication styles differ, and you learn to pick up on those differences. Some people are very direct and with others you need to pay attention to what isn’t being said. You get better at picking up on those nuances and adapting your own approach. For a lawyer, that matters. You can give perfectly good advice, but if you haven’t understood your audience or the context they’re operating in, it may not have the impact you intended.

I think you’re right. There’s a lot of excitement about AI, and a strong view that it can replace some of what lawyers do, which could ultimately mean leaner legal teams. But I think there’s a gap between how quickly the technology is developing and the pace at which organisations can realistically adopt it.

There’s a learning curve. People are still working out how to use these tools effectively, where they genuinely add value and where you still need a lawyer very much in the loop. AI can do a first cut of your contract or help accelerate research, but you still need to review and test the output. That’s where judgment becomes really important. What do you accept? What do you challenge? And how do you turn it into advice that works for the business? Learning how to prompt and interact with AI effectively is a skill in itself. Those capabilities need to develop over time, and legal teams are doing all of this while still dealing with the pressures of the day job.

So I don’t think you can expect AI to make legal teams dramatically more efficient, or leaner, straight away. The tools are still developing, people are learning how to use them and existing processes have to change around them. If you give a legal team five months to do nothing but learn and experiment with AI, sure, they’d move much faster. But that’s not the reality. They’re learning it on the go.

I think organisations need to be realistic about that. I’m not sceptical about the potential of AI. I’m just more cautious about how quickly people assume that potential can be realised.

I think so, but there’s a flip side: if you never learnt how to do something yourself, how do you know when AI has got it wrong?

You still need the technical foundations. You need to know what a good contract looks like and why, how you research properly and how to work through a legal problem. AI might get you to an answer faster, but you need to know the basics to know whether that answer is any good.

So I don’t think you skip the basics. The question is how you build judgment alongside them in this new environment. For a younger lawyer, I think that means looking for exposure wherever you can get it. Sit in on the call, spend time with the business, ask why a decision was made, work with people who approach a problem differently to you. Those experiences start to build up.

A non-traditional path can give you more of those opportunities, but it’s not a substitute for the technical grounding. You need both.

Definitely the tech-savvy lawyer – not just the person who knows how to use the tools. The person who knows when to use them, how to test what comes back and where their own judgment needs to come in.

And the curious lawyer. Someone who asks questions, who is open to different experiences and different ways of doing things and who thinks deliberately about the type of lawyer they want to become. How am I going to get there? What do I need to learn or experience along the way? And how can I use technology to help me get there, rather than handing it all over to the technology?

That is a great question. So how did it come about? I’m actually an environmental lawyer by background, but I only practised in the area for a short time before we moved to Singapore. The move meant I couldn’t simply continue down the path I’d started on, so quite early in my career I had to reinvent myself and move into other areas of law.

At Toll, I’d been doing the legal thing for about six years and I was getting a little antsy. Sustainability was becoming a big topic, so I put my hand up and asked how I could get involved. I started a sustainability working group in the Global Forwarding business, looking at things like biofuels, sustainable aviation fuel and how we engaged with customers. We dabbled in it, really.

That eventually led to a full-time secondment into sustainability that was meant to last a year and became two. Part of the attraction for me was that I knew it would stretch me in ways that staying in legal probably wouldn’t. It would give me broader exposure to senior decision-making, develop my ability to influence across the organisation, and help me to understand what it was like to actually own and deliver something operationally rather than advise on it.

There were definitely things I brought with me from legal that were really useful. One was being able to take a very broad, complex problem and give it some structure. The other was rigour: thinking about evidence, governance, where things might be challenged and making sure what we were doing could stand up to scrutiny.

That helped a lot when we were building our emissions data capability. My mindset was: we need to get this right, we can’t afford an adverse audit finding. Knowing what auditors and regulators look for made a real difference.

But what I learnt going the other way was probably more interesting.

Sustainability taught me to influence without authority in a very different way. When you’re trying to decarbonise a transport business, you need fleet, property and individual businesses to change things. You can’t always point to a legal requirement and say “we have to do this”. You have to bring people with you. You don’t necessarily control their decisions or their resources. You have to understand their constraints and work out what will actually move them.

It also reinforced that having the right answer isn’t enough. You can have a brilliant decarbonisation pathway, but if nobody is acting on it, it’s just a piece of paper. As a lawyer, I already knew that communication mattered: you have to translate complexity into why it matters and what someone needs to do. But having sat on the operational side, I now understand much better what I’m translating it into: competing priorities, commercial realities and decisions that are rarely made through a purely legal lens.

Looking back, I don’t really see those two years as stepping away from legal. I think they gave me an operational lens that has made me a much better in-house lawyer.

Yes, the risk mindset was intuitive, but climate risk gave me a very different way of looking at what risk actually means for a business. As lawyers, we naturally think about things like regulatory, contractual or compliance risk. Climate risk got me thinking about a very different type of risk: what happens if extreme weather becomes more frequent? Where does that leave the business exposed? What can we do to make it more resilient?

We were building the resilience plan bottom-up, so I got to see how the different businesses and functions thought about those risks, what they could realistically mitigate and where they were exposed. It really broadened the way I think about risk.

It did. One thing I found interesting was seeing the breadth of the role legal actually plays from the outside. Environmental compliance sat under sustainability, so I had a lot of interaction with the legal team. I saw them acting not just as advisers, but as project managers and strategists as well.

But probably the bigger lesson was experiencing legal as an internal client. We had built and automated a legal process and I’d always heard parts of the business complain about it. When I was in the Legal team I’d think, “well, you don’t know how much better this is than what we had before”. Then I had to use it myself and I started to think “actually, this bit’s confusing” or “this bit’s clunky” or “why do I have to do this?”

It gave me much more empathy for the user of a legal process. Legal wants information because we need it to assess the risk properly. The business is thinking “I just need to get this done”. Neither is wrong. The challenge is designing legal processes that satisfy both. I came back to Legal with quite a few ideas about what we could improve, simply because I experienced it from the other side.

I think it depends on what you want to do, but if you want to be an effective in-house lawyer, I think there’s enormous value in spending time actually owning a business problem.

One example: I thought I had a brilliant plan for procuring green energy, and at the enterprise level it absolutely made sense. But when you got down to the particular business that actually had to implement it and looked at their incentives, priorities and resourcing, the answer was much less straightforward.

That experience taught me to ask not just “is this the right answer?” but “is this an answer that will actually work?” You see much more directly how businesses prioritise when there are several perfectly good things they could do and limited resources to do them.

You also learn things you never thought you would. I can now speak tech: I know what a UAT environment is, what dev is, what prod is. That was honestly one of the toughest parts of the job, because it was all new to me.

I also became much more comfortable thinking in terms of return on investment and organisational design.

For me, that time away from legal was incredibly useful for building judgment because it gave me another perspective from which to test my legal advice.

A little. You can understand ROI conceptually in Legal, whereas on the business side you’re actually living the trade-offs. You see much more directly how decisions are prioritised. Something that can look perfect on paper may still not be the thing that gets done, because the business has other pressures or priorities at that point. Seeing how those decisions actually get made was eye-opening.

It was.

I thought I was just going to be looking at contracts. That’s what lawyers do, right? And yes, there was a lot of contracting work, but I realised quite quickly that being in-house was so much broader than that. Almost every business decision has some legal element to it: tax, entering or exiting a market, employment, supply chain, regulatory issues. You get exposed to the whole gamut.

What I probably got wrong was thinking that my job was to provide the best legal answer. I came to understand that the job is really to help the business achieve what it’s trying to achieve, while identifying and managing the risks that could get in the way.

So what becomes really important is working out where Legal can actually add value. I could have a legal view on almost everything, but that doesn’t mean I should be involved in everything. What is the business trying to achieve? What could get in the way? And how can Legal help?

Then there’s how you advise the business. I think when I first went in-house, my instinct was: this is the law, this is what the best contract looks like, and here’s my answer. But good in-house advice has to start with what the business is trying to achieve and the person you’re advising.

One thing I tell younger lawyers coming in-house is that once you have your legal answer, stop and think about who you’re talking to. If you’re talking to the CFO, what are they really interested in? If it’s the head of HR, what do they need from you? You may have exactly the same underlying issue, but how you frame the advice and what you emphasise can be very different. That doesn’t mean changing the legal answer. It means making the advice useful to the person who has to make the decision.

So I went in thinking I’d be looking at contracts and giving legal answers, and fairly quickly realised the role was much broader than that. Sometimes I was an adviser, sometimes a strategist, sometimes a hand-holder and sometimes a challenger. In-house counsel wear many hats and the role is much bigger than just knowing the law.

I was extremely fortunate to have some really great mentors when I started in-house. But interestingly, the most valuable mentoring wasn’t someone sitting down and teaching me how to mark up a contract.

A lot of it was observation. One of the best things you can do is sit quietly on a call with someone who is really good at what they do and watch them. How do they communicate the advice? When do they push and when do they step back? How do they read the room? How do they make the advice land with that particular person?

I also learned a lot from asking questions. The best advice I was given when I moved in-house was simply to ask lots of them. There really is no stupid question when you’re trying to understand a business. Ask why they do something that way. Ask what happens operationally if you give a particular piece of advice.

The curiosity is how you start building context around the law, and I think a lot of judgment comes from that context.

I actually started out as a personal injury lawyer, and I realised pretty quickly that it wasn’t for me. I did not enjoy going to court or to tribunals at all.

Yes, and that was much more where I saw myself. But I only had a relatively short time practising in that area before I moved to Singapore.

My partner moved to Singapore for work, so I came as a trailing spouse. It certainly wasn’t part of some grand career plan. Honestly, it took me a couple of years to find work here, and that was difficult. I had started down a path in Canada that I really enjoyed and suddenly I couldn’t just continue down it.

So I went back to school, studied public policy and I also did my UK legal qualifications. That eventually led me to Diageo because I needed a year’s experience working under a UK-qualified lawyer, and they were willing to take me on. And actually, that completely unplanned move ended up shaping the rest of my career.

Almost 19 years.

The first is resilience. It is not easy moving to another country and trying to build something again. There are knockbacks, and it can be soul-destroying at times. You just learn to keep going.

It teaches you flexibility and adaptability. If I’d had a rigid career path in mind, I would never be where I am. You have to be willing to speak to people, explore opportunities and be curious about what else is out there. That sustainability secondment is a good example. It started with curiosity, really: I’m interested in this, can I get involved? And it grew from there.

Then there’s the appreciation for different ways of doing things. What works in one country may not work in another. Communication styles differ, and you learn to pick up on those differences. Some people are very direct and with others you need to pay attention to what isn’t being said. You get better at picking up on those nuances and adapting your own approach. For a lawyer, that matters. You can give perfectly good advice, but if you haven’t understood your audience or the context they’re operating in, it may not have the impact you intended.

Absolutely. If you’d asked me early in my career whether I’d be a transportation, logistics or freight forwarding lawyer, absolutely not. That was not the plan or the dream. I fell into it after Diageo, where I supported the supply chain team, so I was already getting exposure to transportation. Then I moved to FedEx, which was squarely transportation and logistics, and one role led to the next.

No day is the same. I know most people say that about their jobs, but the issues you deal with in cross-border transportation and logistics, you couldn’t make them up.

And you get exposed to so many different areas of law. It’s not just contracts or trade compliance. There’s sanctions, anti-bribery, financing, forex, tax. You become comfortable moving between very different issues and working out quite quickly what actually matters.

Then there’s the pace. It’s fast-moving, so you learn to think and advise quickly, as well. But you also learn when you need to be the person who says “hang on, we need to slow this one down.”

It is fascinating. From the outside, logistics can look quite straightforward: you move something from A to B. Then you get inside the industry and realise how much has to come together to make that happen. The operational complexity is incredible.

I think industry matters, but I wouldn’t choose one just because it looks exciting from the outside or because it’s the one everyone is talking about.

I’d think more about what the environment will expose you to: interesting problems, how the business really operates, different perspectives and opportunities to build judgment.

If you want to build judgment and become a well-rounded lawyer, industries like logistics are a great place to do it. You’re exposed not just to the legal issues but to the operational and people side of the business, and there’s so much variety to learn from.

So I’d worry less about whether an industry sounds sexy and more about whether the work is interesting and the environment is going to help you grow.

Good question. I think you can influence a lot, but you have to start with the business rather than with Legal. The most effective legal strategy is the one that supports the business strategy. Before deciding what Legal should look like, you need to understand what the business is trying to achieve, what its priorities are and its appetite for risk. You can set up all the processes and policies in the world, but if they don’t reflect how the business actually operates or support its goals, you’re going to struggle to be an effective partner.

And then you have to earn the right to be brought into the conversation. For me, that comes from being visible, building credibility and really understanding the business. If people see that you understand what they are trying to do and that you can help them get there, they start involving you earlier and on a broader range of issues.

I think there are limits. You can change how people view Legal, but you can’t necessarily change what an organisation ultimately wants Legal to be.

You can build credibility, show the value that Legal can bring beyond getting the contract signed, and sometimes that does change the relationship. People start coming to you earlier because they see that you can help them think through the issue, rather than just telling them they can or can’t do something.

But ultimately, if the leadership genuinely only wants Legal to perform a narrow role, I’m not sure an individual GC can completely overcome that, however capable they are.

And then it becomes a personal decision: is that the kind of legal function you want to lead? If your idea of being an effective GC is fundamentally different from what the organisation wants from Legal, at some point you have to decide whether that’s the right environment for you.

I think you’re right. There’s a lot of excitement about AI, and a strong view that it can replace some of what lawyers do, which could ultimately mean leaner legal teams. But I think there’s a gap between how quickly the technology is developing and the pace at which organisations can realistically adopt it.

There’s a learning curve. People are still working out how to use these tools effectively, where they genuinely add value and where you still need a lawyer very much in the loop. AI can do a first cut of your contract or help accelerate research, but you still need to review and test the output. That’s where judgment becomes really important. What do you accept? What do you challenge? And how do you turn it into advice that works for the business? Learning how to prompt and interact with AI effectively is a skill in itself. Those capabilities need to develop over time, and legal teams are doing all of this while still dealing with the pressures of the day job.

So I don’t think you can expect AI to make legal teams dramatically more efficient, or leaner, straight away. The tools are still developing, people are learning how to use them and existing processes have to change around them. If you give a legal team five months to do nothing but learn and experiment with AI, sure, they’d move much faster. But that’s not the reality. They’re learning it on the go.

I think organisations need to be realistic about that. I’m not sceptical about the potential of AI. I’m just more cautious about how quickly people assume that potential can be realised.

Yes. There’s quite a lot of groundwork that has to happen before you get to the exciting bit. You’ve got to get all your playbooks in order, think about your data and processes and work out what you actually want AI to do. There’s a lot to be said for having legal operations capability focused on that work, because it’s very difficult to make that change properly and at speed when you’re also trying to do the BAU.

Absolutely. You can have that whole spectrum within a single legal team. Some people are still very wary of AI and approach it with a lot of caution. Others are playing with it all the time, building agents and trying to figure out where it’s useful.

I think that’s part of the reality at the moment: the technology can be moving incredibly quickly, but people are adopting it at different speeds.

I think the non-traditional career path is becoming much more relevant: paths like mine, where you don’t go through all the rotations in private practice before going in-house, and where you might move in and out of legal or try something adjacent to it.

There’s also a much broader range of roles open to people with legal backgrounds now. There’s legal ops, sustainability, technology and other areas where a legal background is really useful, even if you’re not necessarily doing a traditional legal job.

I think that becomes particularly interesting with AI, because some of the work that junior lawyers have traditionally learnt through, like initial research, first drafts or a first pass of a contract, can increasingly be done by AI. So we probably need to think more deliberately about where you get the experiences that help you develop judgment. For me, judgment is taking your technical knowledge, combining it with experience, context and an understanding of people, and then deciding what actually matters and what to do next.

That’s where trying different things, working in different environments and learning from different perspectives can be really valuable. It all helps you build judgment. Looking back at my own career, some of the experiences that have made me a better lawyer have happened outside the traditional legal path. So I think younger lawyers can afford to be a bit more open-minded about what a useful career experience looks like.

I think so, but there’s a flip side: if you never learnt how to do something yourself, how do you know when AI has got it wrong?

You still need the technical foundations. You need to know what a good contract looks like and why, how you research properly and how to work through a legal problem. AI might get you to an answer faster, but you need to know the basics to know whether that answer is any good.

So I don’t think you skip the basics. The question is how you build judgment alongside them in this new environment. For a younger lawyer, I think that means looking for exposure wherever you can get it. Sit in on the call, spend time with the business, ask why a decision was made, work with people who approach a problem differently to you. Those experiences start to build up.

A non-traditional path can give you more of those opportunities, but it’s not a substitute for the technical grounding. You need both.

Definitely the tech-savvy lawyer – not just the person who knows how to use the tools. The person who knows when to use them, how to test what comes back and where their own judgment needs to come in.

And the curious lawyer. Someone who asks questions, who is open to different experiences and different ways of doing things and who thinks deliberately about the type of lawyer they want to become. How am I going to get there? What do I need to learn or experience along the way? And how can I use technology to help me get there, rather than handing it all over to the technology?

I’m taking my own advice and staying curious and open, but I probably know myself better now and I’m clearer about the type of work I find interesting.

I really enjoy leading and developing teams. I enjoy working with the business and solving difficult problems. I also like making things better, whether that’s how a legal function operates, how it partners with the business, or how you bring people together to deliver change. I probably get more excited by those things than I do by sitting down with a contract these days.

So I’m not necessarily fixated on a particular title or on what the next role is supposed to look like. I’m looking for something where I can bring the experience I’ve built, but where there’s still a lot for me to learn and something meaningful for me to build or shape.

That combination of being able to contribute and still being stretched is probably what I’m looking for next.