The speed of the Flex onboarding process amazed Fahim. Within a month of his first meeting with MinterEllison's Flex Consultants, he was provided with a selection of roles. Only one month later, Fahim was on the ground working with clients.
One of the main drivers for Fahim towards this style of working was finding an engagement suitable to his circumstances at the time.
According to Fahim, a key advantage of being a MinterEllison Flex lawyer is that there's a wide variety of clients available across a diverse range of sectors. Being able to leverage the connections that MinterEllison has with those clients provides many opportunities for legal practitioners at various levels.
Fahim's first Flex engagement was with a manufacturer of trailers for heavy vehicle transportation where his Flex work accelerated his integration into the team. Fahim reflects: "I was fortunate enough to be able to meet with their General Counsel pretty much within a few weeks of my having had my first consultation with my Flex Consultant".
Fahim enjoyed the experience of working within different industries. His Flex engagements allowed him to broaden his legal skills and develop a deeper commercial understanding of different clients and their quite different legal requirements.
"I spent three months as part of a university's Intellectual Property commercialisation team, followed by nine months as part of the procurement function for a state government department's strategic technology transformation project".
Fahim is a technology lawyer by background. He experienced the benefits of Flex by developing inhouse legal skills through exposure to clients of different sizes and business requirements. This allowed him to gain skills across areas he wouldn't normally be exposed to, such as industrial relations, corporate, media as well as defamation, corporate transactions and tax.
Being a MinterEllison alumni, Fahim learned about the Flex program through former colleagues. Due to family and professional circumstances, Fahim spent several years outside of the profession but was seeking a way to return in a unique capacity. Flex was the perfect solution for a different type of opportunity to the traditional law firm experience.
One of the key things I found attractive about Flex was the diversity of commercial experience available primarily through the client base of a firm like MinterEllison which in turn set me up for success in various different opportunities.”
Fahim Ahad
"My experience working as a Flex lawyer has helped me to sharpen my skills across a breadth of sectors and to a depth that wouldn't typically be available to a lawyer in private practice."
The work exposed Fahim to different client needs. For example, some were looking to set up a Greenfield inhouse function and required assistance in educating the business in terms of how to best utilise their internal resources. Others were looking for augmentation for their internal legal teams for a short period of time, while others were looking for a dedicated lawyer to support a project or a longer term transaction.
"My advice for people interested in being engaged under the Flex model would be to make yourself open and available to different types of opportunities and to make those opportunities work for you in terms of the flexibility, the diversity of opportunity and also the development of your own career and professional skills."
