"Marissa is a highly talented and experienced lawyer that you can trust to do things properly. She fitted in seamlessly with our team and quickly built good working relationships. It was a pleasure having her on board and with her working remotely from Madrid, a real treat for us and internal clients to start work with advice having been turned around overnight and in the inbox."
- Jason Hawthorne, GC Serko.
What inspired your move overseas and how has working from another country fit into your life so far?
My family’s love for adventure and learning (and my husband's diplomatic postings!) has taken us from New Zealand to Chile and now Spain over the past seven years. When Helen Mackay contacted me shortly after we shifted to Chile to see if I would be interested in joining the new law firm she was setting up, I embraced the opportunity! I've been grateful to be able to combine rewarding, varied work with global life.
While based in Chile, I had an engagement in the Legal Team at Victoria University and for the majority of that time, most of my internal clients weren’t aware that I wasn’t sitting in the office in Wellington. [Editor’s note: read more about this in this case study: Te Herenga Waka VUW legal team is in high demand - we need some support]
Through living abroad, I've been fortunate to attend conferences that focus on different jurisdictions, meet new contacts and learn about different services - all this deepens the insights I can share in a Juno engagement.
What are some of the challenges you’ve faced while working remotely, and how have you overcome them to maintain seamless collaboration?
Technology has been my friend in the remote work journey. The majority of organisations I’ve worked with have been set up to allow for seamless remote work, communicating via Teams or Slack, for example. To maintain visibility of work allocated across a team, using Trello boards to monitor progress has been helpful. Sometimes, Juno engagements are only for short periods of time to fill a resourcing gap while the client’s team hires for new resource, so having a tool like Confluence for keeping a record of work done, contracts reviewed, feedback sought is invaluable for handovers.
Working remotely (whether offshore or within New Zealand), I’ve realised that the location of where an employee is should not be an issue for organisations – the work gets done regardless of where the keyboard is. Adapting to time differences often means early morning meetings for me, but it’s a small price to pay for the flexibility gained.
Can you share any specific examples of how the time difference has worked in favour of the client and improved efficiency?
There have been several times where work has been sent to me at the end of the New Zealand working day and I’ve been able to work on it during my day and deliver results by the start of the client’s day. I had a situation when I was with the team at Serko recently where an urgent piece of work came across the legal team inbox at the end of the day on a Thursday. This was handed over to me, being the start of my Thursday, and I was able to work on this and get it to the internal client by the deadline early the next Monday.
Additionally, when negotiating tech contracts with European partners, being in the same time zone has facilitated smoother discussions and quicker resolution on negotiation points.
How do you think the "follow-the-sun" model benefits clients, and what feedback have you received from them about this approach?
For organisations with tight deadlines, global clients, or teams across multiple time zones, the follow-the-sun model offers significant efficiency. It allows in-house legal teams to receive timely advice and make progress on urgent matters, even outside normal working hours, without putting extra pressure on their local teams.
Clients have provided really positive feedback on this approach, appreciating how advice was ready for them at the start of their day, allowing them to move quickly on urgent tasks. The seamless nature of the service meant internal teams barely noticed the difference in time zones, highlighting how efficiently the model works.
For this model to shine brightest, strong internal communication is essential. Handing off work across time zones requires coordination, but when done well, it reduces stress on New Zealand-based teams by preventing late-night work sessions while keeping productivity high and ensuring deadlines are consistently met.
Ngā mihi to Marissa Flowerday, for sharing her experience of working remotely with our community.
If you'd like to learn more about Our services, particularly the follow-the-sun offering, get in touch.