Q&A: Geraldine Chin Moody – “Every board is strengthened by having a board composition that brings diversity of background, diversity of experience, and diversity of thinking patterns and styles.”

This article is an edited version of a podcast. Listen to the full interview via this link.

In short:

• Geraldine Chin Moody is a board and governance principal at Directors Australia, which provides tailored board and governance advisory services and specialist board search and recruitment assistance. After starting her career at Mallesons and going on to be Chief Operating Officer (COO) at Baker McKenzie, she has also held various executive roles for ASX-listed companies and served on a range of governance and advisory boards.
• She believes setting up boards with diverse skillsets, experience and attributes can be an effective way to improve culture and performance in law firms.
• Chin Moody advises having a board composition matrix that identifies the necessary talent and skillsets that are required to respond to strategy decisions, challenges and stakeholder needs.

Geraldine, thinking of your journey from law student to COO of a major firm to now advising boards, is it fair to say that your career has been ever-evolving?

Certainly, in 1998, when I was interviewing for law firm summer clerkships, I expected to be working for a lawyer longer than I did. But I got an incredible opportunity to work in the CEO's office at Mallesons on projects relating to the future of the workforce, international expansion, gender equality and digital technologies. Most of those areas can be taken for granted now as being issues of the day, but 30 years ago Mallesons was one of the firms leading the charge. I got the opportunity to be involved in a lot of really exciting strategic and operational projects. That experience taught me to be open-minded to the opportunities that come your way and to think about your career as a portfolio of skills and experiences, rather than in a more linear way.

You are in contact with a lot of business and law firm leaders. What is keeping them up at night?

People are thinking about cyber-attacks, technological change and geopolitical instability. Working with boards, we are also seeing people worry about how to manage and keep up with a constantly changing landscape, whether that is at a geopolitical level, locally, or in relation to regulations and the constant changes that are coming. Leaders and chairs of boards are also thinking about getting the right culture in their organisations. How do they make sure they have their finger on the pulse of their culture and how are they leading that from the top in terms of the board dynamics and relationships around the boardroom? In this environment, we want to have diverse boards. We want to have people with different skills and experiences. We want people to have constructive conflict.

What does a good culture look like?

For me, culture is what people do without thinking and when no one is watching. It is important to think about how culture is represented by the everyday actions in an organisation. We have all been through induction programs where we get a glossy brochure that shows us what values are all about. But when we are making hard decisions, when we are going about our everyday tasks, how are we doing that in a way that is in line with the type of environment that we all want to be working in?

You are an advocate of law firms having independent directors with diverse experiences who can really bring in new perspectives and make the firms more successful and sustainable. Tell us more about this philosophy.

That is a starting point in the work Directors Australia does with boards. We say that every board is strengthened by having a board composition that brings diversity of background, diversity of experience, and diversity of thinking patterns and styles that contribute in different ways to the governance of the organisation. For me, it is very much about how you make sure that your board has got those diverse perspectives. If we think about law firms and their stakeholder groups, we want to make sure that we are governing well for the partnership. We want to make sure that we are governing well for all the people that work with us. We also want to make sure we are governing well for our clients, our future clients and for the community and our environment. So, the question is, ‘Are you able to source a board with the diversity of skills from within your partnership and organisation?’ Or is there value in bringing in outside perspectives that can assist you in understanding new regulations and emerging areas, as well as assisting you with your different stakeholders?

What about law firms? How are they doing on this front?

Every professional services firm is different, but what we have seen is that firms which have a more corporate structure in their partnership agreement are more likely to bring in independent directors. They may also bring in retired partners who have gone on to do other roles and who can then come and serve on the board. For some organisations, that can work really well. For organisations with less of a corporate structure, they are more likely to bring in board members from within the partnership. That can work well if they have board members who have a diversity of skills, experiences and geographies, and who have had other roles before they have come on board as a partner. The key questions to ask are, ‘What is needed for your organisation to tackle the challenges ahead of it’ and ‘Have you got a diverse set of skills around the table?’

How can firms get started on this journey?

We recommend that law firms and professional services firms start by developing a board composition matrix. When you are thinking about strategy and challenges and stakeholders, what are the skills and attributes that you need around the table? We then say that you should aim for genuine diversity of skills. Have you got that diversity among your partnership or is there merit in looking at bringing in independent directors. It may also be wise to consider appointing an independent chair who can then bring together the perspectives of partners and independent directors. The key with your board composition matrix is making sure you are blending legal and partnership experience with skills from finance, from technology, customer strategy people and leadership. You should also look at the different geographies you might be considering operating in and understand how to bring that into the board governance discussions to help you perform better and deliver great service for your clients.

You have been around law firms and you know that they can be protective of their partnerships and not want to have to bow to external experts. How can this hurdle be cleared?

Ultimately, my experience with partnerships is that every partner is very loyal to the firm and they want the best for their organisation. And when they have worked in a partnership for their whole career, they see that as having partners on the board who know the organisation and the structures and system in which it works at the governance level. I totally understand that, and it is always going to be important to have partners on law firm boards. I think what that comes from is a fear that they do not want to be told what to do by others. They do not want to lose influence over their business. But having independent directors is not about control, it is actually about capability to help you be better at driving performance and delivering the best results for your clients. This sort of framing can help.

With the rapid adoption of new technology and AI, how are firms responding to the need for a new generation of AI skills?

When you are developing your board composition matrix, you need to know what skills are essential for the firm. So, if you are planning to do huge technology projects and use AI extensively to deliver your client services, you are going to either want board members who have deep expertise in the technology or enough of an understanding to ask the right questions and to know when you need to bring in external advice in areas such as AI and automation, cybersecurity, and agentic AI.

The LMJ’s readership includes a lot of small or sole-practitioner firms. Is this discussion about bringing in external advice relevant to them given that resources may be limited?

Absolutely. I mean, for the smaller firms or even medium firms, it can be even more important to have a board and to bring in independent perspectives because it helps supplement the skills internally. There are a few ways to do that. You could start with an advisory board that is lower cost, but which can be high impact and allow you to bring in some independent skills in areas where you need some supplementation. You could also bring in some external advisors who have digital strategic or commercial expertise or use fractional executives to help you with the finance, HR and operational sides, and really think about what needs to be done in-house versus what can you find a great supplier to do. What I would suggest is that you build that internal governance discipline early. So, whether you have an advisory board, or whether it is a management committee, or even if it is yourself working with your leadership team or an external fractional executive team, to really think about simple monthly reporting and strategy sessions. This keeps you focused on the underlying levers and drivers of profitability and how you are keeping track of those. Otherwise, you end up taking on more work than you can do and you get caught in the hamster wheel.

Do you have any final tips for law firm leaders on how they can perform better in their business?

I will answer that on two levels. First, for individuals, if you are a law firm partner or leader, the most important thing you can do is constantly reflect on your behaviours and what you are contributing to the culture because your actions set the tone for how others around you behave. It is important to make time for that reflection. Some people do it daily, some people do it weekly, some people do it over a holiday break. Think about ‘How am I behaving and am I consistent in displaying the behaviours that I would like to see from others?’

The second aspect that I would emphasise is thinking about ‘How are you investing time upfront in getting the dynamics of your board or team working really well?’ It is much easier to build dynamics and healthy relationships when things are going well than when things have not gone well. Do the work upfront and ask, ‘How do we want to work together?’ One of the most common things that I have been doing with boards is helping to run workshops to establish operating principles between how the board and management work together, or how the board works together around the table. It takes a couple of hours and some surveys beforehand, and you come out of that with a one-pager that says, ‘These are our mutual expectations of each other. This is what we are going to hold ourselves accountable to in terms of our behaviour.’ That gives everyone the licence to call things out as they happen, rather than let them fester because bad news never gets better with age.

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