We’re grateful for the opportunity to reconnect with the Legal & Regulatory team at NZ Post, who we last profiled in 2020. Now led by Group Legal & Regulatory Manager Seb Templeton, the team continues to be known for its deep institutional knowledge and collaborative approach. They share how the team empowers others, builds trust across a national network, and provides steady, practical support in a complex, evolving, and decentralised business.
Could you provide a brief overview of your team and the role you play within your organisation?
The Legal & Regulatory Team at NZ Post provides centralised support across legal, regulatory and government relations functions, as well as managing NZ Post’s wholesale ‘access’ mail customers. We’re a broader team than just legal, and we really value the diverse expertise and points of view the whole team brings.
On the legal side, NZ Post runs one centralised legal function with five lawyers (one part time). Like many in-house teams, we advise across a wide range of topics, including commercial and contracting, sales and marketing, procurement, privacy, competition, disputes and much more. NZ Post also outsources a reasonable amount of legal work via the Legal & Regulatory Team.
We also see ourselves as a central voice and a ‘connector’ across the business. NZ Post is a large and often decentralised business, given our national network. We can play a valuable role connecting different parts of the business and bringing an enterprise-wide lens to work, fitting in well with the broader ambit of our business unit, Governance & Sustainability.
In-house legal are known to 'put out fires before they begin'. How does your in-house team mitigate and foresee risk before it arises?
We’re very proud of the role we play in this regard. As noted above, we’re uniquely placed to look at things with a wide enterprise lens. We also sit alongside the Risk & Audit Team, within Governance & Sustainability, which helps.
It’s a challenge to balance the needs of critical, urgent and reactive work with the need to foresee and manage risk. That, and the fact that NZ Post runs a reasonably decentralised model with different business units taking primary responsibility for their own activities and associated risks. Critical to our approach is acknowledging that we can’t foresee all risks and/or be everywhere at once. We look to empower people in the business to consider, own and manage their own risks, with help from support functions like ours.
We try not to let perfect be the enemy of the good, and find we make good progress simply getting in a room with people to talk through the legal context as we see it, hear their perspective on challenges and risks, and go from there. With the nature of our business, it’s difficult to track a detailed list of obvious or known risks. We find connecting with people is best to inform ourselves and help empower them.
Our current focus in this regard has been a series of in-person roadshows and ‘town hall’ sessions throughout the network and business, touching on a range of topics. We’ll continue those, but we’re also starting to work with our Learning & Development Team to take those experiences and develop them into refresher e-learning modules. We also use corporate communications channels to circulate valuable tips and reminders when we have time.
What strategies do you use to demonstrate the value of the legal team's work to other departments and senior leadership?
"We also work hard to build and maintain the massive depth of knowledge of the business, not just the law, helped by reasonably long tenures and a couple of absolute legends who know the organisation inside and out." |
Great question. We think a lot about the balance between firm boundaries (e.g. come to us when you have a tangible question) on the one hand, and being helpful, helping to guide and add clarity on the other hand. We find people respond well when we’re clear about the process and our priorities, but still helpful and keen to get stuck in. It’s not our style to look for accolades, but by rolling up our sleeves and focusing on results for the business, we’re very well regarded.
We tend to let our work, and the way we work, do the talking. We work hard to understand people’s context and what they’re trying to achieve, and give pragmatic and situation-specific advice. In doing so, we feel we’re an integral part of driving projects forward rather than a wholly independent ‘question and answer’ function. When projects go well, people recognise us as part of the team that helped get there and improve the outcome.
We also work hard to build and maintain the massive depth of knowledge of the business, not just the law, helped by reasonably long tenures and a couple of absolute legends who know the organisation inside and out. That might sound unremarkable but NZ Post has such breadth and history that it takes a real concerted effort to understand every nook and cranny. As a result we’re often the ‘go-to’ for institutional wisdom and how things are done.
What challenges are you anticipating, and how is your team preparing to meet them?
Resourcing and prioritisation are constant challenges, especially during challenging economic times where change, cost saving and revenue generation all take concerted efforts and generate a lot of work. Things move quickly and we don’t always have much warning or time. It’s hard to plan a pipeline of work and keep stakeholders happy. We have to communicate clearly and ruthlessly prioritise by reference to enterprise priorities.
In tough times like these, everyone is under pressure, not just us. We need to be empathetic and helpful without taking everything on ourselves. As covered above, we apply a ‘help others to help themselves’ approach, making sure that we empower others but remain clear where ultimate responsibility for programmes, compliance, risk management and other accountabilities lies.
At the more specific end, NZ Post is a business undergoing major change, especially with mail declining and parcel delivery growing. That brings challenges, especially finding fit for purpose ways to deliver declining mail in the future (as we still operate a reasonably fixed cost, comprehensive and regulated mail network). It also brings challenges and opportunities around data and technology, as ‘low data’ mail declines, ‘data rich’ e-commerce grows, and we implement more advanced sortation and delivery technologies.
As a team, we embrace these opportunities and meet the challenges in a variety of ways. Where appropriate, we step out of our lane a little and leverage our unique perspective to challenge business thinking. We think of risk as a challenge to mitigate or overcome rather than putting up roadblocks to change and progress. And where possible, we dive in ourselves – trying things out or signing up for trials.
We also find that external perspectives, e.g. through advice, publications or seminars, are a good way to stay current, gain perspective, test our thinking and prepare for new challenges. Having that broader perspective is especially important in a large and mature business fronting into major change and a more digital future.
Ngā mihi nui to Seb Templeton and the team for sharing a thoughtful look into the work of NZ Post’s Legal & Regulatory team, and for highlighting how in-house lawyers contribute to connection, clarity, and enterprise-wide thinking.
This article features in Juno Counsel, our regular newsletter, sharing ideas, challenges, and real-life experiences with Aotearoa's in-house legal community. Subscribe to the Juno Counsel newsletter here.
We’ve previously supported the NZ Post legal team with customised legal solutions, and remain proud of the work we’ve done together. If you're curious about how we collaborate with in-house legal teams across Aotearoa, feel free to explore Our Services.