Blog

Welcome to the Checklist Legal blog, your comprehensive hub for transforming your legal challenges into strategic opportunities. As a B Corp certified law firm, we blend our commitment to commercial law, contract simplification, and legal innovation with a passion for creating a fair and equitable business environment.

Join us as we create ripples of change in the world of contracts and business.

How to navigate these posts

Just scroll on through and read what takes your fancy or select from the categories below to get down to specifics.

Podcast, Professional Development, All Verity White Podcast, Professional Development, All Verity White

Ep3 Maximise Meeting Productivity: Tips and Tricks for Legal Professionals

This video provides practical tips for making in-house meetings more productive and less draining. From giving meetings fun names to setting clear agendas, the speaker emphasises maintaining energy and team alignment.

Key steps include planning meetings with a five-step structure: top-of-mind topics, progress, problems, plans, and actions. Additionally, tips for efficient scheduling, such as starting meetings five minutes past the hour, are shared.

The speaker also highlights the importance of pleasantries and suggests following up with structured after-meeting emails to capture decisions and actions.

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Podcast, Professional Development, All Verity White Podcast, Professional Development, All Verity White

Ep2 From Solo Lawyer to Head Legal Beagle: Building a Tech-Savvy Legal Team with Kate Sherburn

What does it really take to go from solo legal counsel to Head of Legal at a fast-growing B Corp?

In this episode of Legal Lightbulbs, we chat with Kate Sherburn, Head Legal Beagle at Who Gives a Crap, about building confidence, leading with purpose, and scaling a legal function with strategy and values.

Kate shares the lessons she’s learned from private practice to in-house, how she used tech and contract simplification to scale legal impact (not headcount), and why emotional intelligence is the superpower lawyers need most in the age of AI.

You'll hear how her small team handles legal ops, budget requests, contract design, and stakeholder education… all while staying aligned with the company’s bold sustainability mission.

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Events, All, IRL Events Verity White Events, All, IRL Events Verity White

Upcoming Event: Contract Design Roundtable (Auckland)

Look out Auckland, it’s time for Legal Design!

What to expect:

🔸 Small group discussion with some of the best creative minds in contracting

🔸 Insights into comic contracting, large scale contract design projects, and using AI for contracting

🔸 Lots of fun and new legal design friends!

More details: https://checklistlegal.typeform.com/events

Event Details

📅 Date: Wednesday, 31 May 202

⏰ Time: TBC

📍 Location: TBC

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Events, All, IRL Events Verity White Events, All, IRL Events Verity White

Upcoming Event: Contract Design Roundtable (Wellington)

Look out Wellington, it’s time for Legal Design!

What to expect:

🔸 Small group discussion with some of the best creative minds in contracting

🔸 Insights into comic contracting, large scale contract design projects, and using AI for contracting

🔸 Lots of fun and new legal design friends!

More details: https://checklistlegal.typeform.com/events

Event Details

📅 Date: Tuesday, 30 May 202

⏰ Time: TBC

📍 Location: TBC

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Events, All, IRL Events Verity White Events, All, IRL Events Verity White

Upcoming Event: Contract Design Workshop: Fair Terms Special (Sydney)

A special *fair terms* edition of our popular hands-on contract design workshop.... Excited to deliver this one in real life in Sydney!

📅 Date: Wed, 3 May 2023

⏰ Time: 6pm for 6.10pm start

📍 Location: The Commons, George Street, Sydney

What to expect:

🔸 A fun, hands-on workshop that equips you with the skills to make your contracts easy-to-read and understand

🔸 Insights into the updated Unfair Contract Terms laws and how contract design can help

🔸 CPD Points (1 x Practice Management and 1 x Professional Skills)

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Events, All, IRL Events Verity White Events, All, IRL Events Verity White

Upcoming Event: Contract Design Roundtable (Perth)

Look out Western Australia, it’s time for Legal Design!

What to expect:

🔸 Small group discussion with some of the best creative minds in contracting

🔸 Insights into comic contracting, large scale contract design projects, and using AI for contracting

🔸 Lots of fun and new legal design friends!

More details: https://checklistlegal.typeform.com/events

Event Details

📅 Date: Thu, 20 April 2023

⏰ Time: TBC

📍 Location: TBC

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Events, All Verity White Events, All Verity White

Upcoming Event: Tech Enabled Lawyer: Real Talk (Melbourne)

Coming up on Tuesday 21st of March 2023, Verity will join Fiona McLay, Principal Lawyer & Consultant at McLay Legal and author of the Tech Enabled Lawyer for a FREE in-person informative and practical session on everything legal business and tech.

This session is hosted by Centre of Legal Innovation. Verity will also be joined by Emma Maxwell, Director and Family Lawyer, Anchored Family Law and Laura Vickers, Director + Principal Lawyer, Nest Legal.

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Simplifying Legals, All Admin & Co Simplifying Legals, All Admin & Co

Building the Fair Term Checker App Part 2

In this second part of the video series, Verity dives into the background of how she built the Fair Term Checker, which assists in-house lawyers in complying with the unfair contract terms laws set to be implemented in Australia in 2023. She explains how she planned out the app using mind mapping tool Coggle and why having a visual flowchart is essential to building a chatbot app.

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Events, News Admin & Co Events, News Admin & Co

Legal Innovation & Tech Festival

Our Founder and Chief Contract Enthusiast Verity White has been working with the Legal Innovation & Tech Festival for many years now. Here are some of her Contract Design Presentations, Tips and Resources from Legal Tech Fest.

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Designing contracts for yes

How to create contracts clients want to sign.

If I could have one birthday wish (yes… it is my birthday today!), it would be that everyone who writes contracts tries hard to make them readable and understandable. It’s more important now than ever that our contracts are clear, actionable, user-focused, and automated. It was an absolute delight contributing a chapter to Juro’s Modern Contract Handbook

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Podcast, Professional Development, All Verity White Podcast, Professional Development, All Verity White

Ep11 How to make a Reverse Sandwich Contract – the high level process for creating a powerfully productive contract

Time to make your contract process more productive. This is the episode that puts together all the previous episodes and ideas into one full process overview… We run through the four big Secrets of Productive Contracts. We step through six steps of how to make a Reverse Sandwich Contract™  which makes use of those four contract secrets

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Podcast, Professional Development, All Admin & Co Podcast, Professional Development, All Admin & Co

Ep10 How to map a contract for productivity

Time to make your contract process more productive. On this episode of the Checklist Legal Podcast, we look at: How to create a mind map, My favourite application for creating mind maps, How to create process maps for more complicated contracts with lots of moving parts and of course our ACTIONABLE CHALLENGE that we have in every episode for you to try.

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Podcast, Professional Development, All Verity White Podcast, Professional Development, All Verity White

Ep09 How to make your contracting process more productive

On this episode of the Checklist Legal Podcast, we look at: Why you have to get your contract process in sync with your contract document, An example of an out of sync, slow process and how process mapping fixed it, Why a visual map of a contract process is so useful, The common culprits of slow contract processes and how to fix them and of course our ACTIONABLE CHALLENGE that we have in every episode for you to try

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