The Harris & Company director continues to apply what he learned working retail in his school days
Jonathan Harris started 2025 off with a bang when he was promoted to director at Harris & Company in February. The new leadership role sees Harris leading a team of paralegals and junior solicitors, allowing him to indulge one of his passions: mentoring.
In the first part of this interview conducted shortly after Harris’ promotion, he shares with Australasian Lawyer why lawyers shouldn’t reduce practice to following a checklist, and how he wove his experience working in retail into the way he works as a lawyer.
I’d always planned on studying further after school and I’d always been encouraged by my family to train in some kind of profession. Throughout school I’d worked in retail, and I thrived off the sense of satisfaction of providing good service or receiving positive feedback for going above and beyond.
I think eventually I realised that law was a good way do something intellectually complex and challenging while still getting to work with people in a client service capacity. That customer service mindset still informs a lot of how I approach dealing with clients and is what gives me a lot of fulfilment from the role.
My favourite part of the job is being constantly challenged to think laterally and find a way to leverage the best outcome for the client. I’ve always found the challenge of coming up with a solution to a difficult problem much more interesting than ‘shooting fish in a barrel’. There is a real sense of satisfaction when you are presented with a complex or niche problem without an obvious solution, or where the odds are stacked against you, but you manage to leverage a better outcome through negotiation or find a new way of applying the law to your client’s benefit.
I’m not sure that there is just one memorable moment of my career so far. I’ve been fairly lucky to have really great mentors, particularly at Harris & Company, who have given me great exposure to varied and interesting work and have constantly challenged me with complex legal problems and encouraged me to build my own practice. I’ve had the opportunity to work on some really interesting matters and deals, alongside a mix of corporate and private clients from a wide range of industries.
The cumulative experience of working with a great team who’ve developed and challenged me to grow in my practice is probably the most memorable part of my career as a whole.
I think the biggest lesson I’ve learnt is not to get caught in the trap of looking at the practice of law as a purely procedural or a ‘form filling’ exercise. It is inevitable that some part of legal practice will involve a degree of routine processes or repeated tasks, and I think it is easy to become complacent if you reduce practice to following the pro-forma or checklist.
Young lawyers should get in the habit early of understanding why something is done a certain way and questioning the actual substantive law behind the process. There are often very good reasons why something is done a certain way, or there is some historical precedent or custom which informs why certain processes have developed. By actively thinking about and questioning why we do things a certain way, you start to properly engage with the law rather than merely the process, and can advocate more effectively for clients where there is a more efficient way of achieving the desired result.
