Sian Wingate

ABOUT SIAN

Legal Operations and Compliance Specialist

Hi, I’m Sian

I am passionate about helping organisations to simplify the complexity of setting up operational frameworks for delivery of legal services and establishing compliance programmes.

With 20 years experience in legal services , I have developed a range of proven frameworks to ‘get things done’ in a simple but effective way.

I have two decades under my belt in legal and compliance services.

In the UK, my decade of private practice experience spanned global finance and acquisitions. Managing multiple deals across various countries and time zones taught me how to get organised and meet tight deadlines.

In NZ, now called home, my in-house legal practice of 13+ years has been spread across regulated sectors such as telecommunications, utilities and local government. Delivering a vast range of legal areas in an in-house lawyer demanded a new way of working. I developed frameworks to provide legal support alongside running a legal department efficiently and effectively.

I know first-hand how balancing risk with compliance alongside getting the ‘day-to-day’ legal work delivered can be a challenge for organisations of all sizes. I’ve been there.

And it can be done!

I have spent over a decade in-house refining my methods to:

  • identify core legal services that demand in-house legal support

  • build quality relationships with panel firms to supplement the in-house team services

  • create resources to make legal teams more effective

  • train business units to learn how to be compliant to meet legal and regulatory obligations

  • improve capability of lawyers and operational teams to spot legal risks early and manage them

  • implement compliance tools and training

  • set up and maintain legal operational frameworks to manage matters, host templates and monitor legal spend

I founded sian wingate advisory to pass on my skills and proven frameworks to other legal and compliance teams.

It took me a decade to build these frameworks.

I want other in-house legal teams and compliance functions to gain access to my techniques a lot faster. In months rather than years.

I now provide consulting, advisory and training to legal teams and compliance functions of all shapes and sizes. Sole counsel, individual compliance officers to small teams all the way through to large institutional teams.

Thanks for visiting my website to learn more about me and my journey.

Feel free to browse.

If you’d like a chat to learn more book a Teams chat here.

 

ORGANISATIONS I HAVE HELPED

How I Help Legal & Compliance Teams

Legal Operations | Implementation | Advisory | Training

I have successfully created a legal operations implementation programme catered to legal teams from sole counsel to large scale teams.

I call this my sole to scale™ legal operations framework.

This has been tried and tested over the past decade. It offers in-house 16 point framework guarantees in-house legal teams a clear roadmap to establish a service delivery model that enables them to work efficiently and effectively.

I help in-house legal teams by:

  • reviewing their current legal operations maturity

  • creating an implementation roadmap to improve their delivery model

  • training their lawyers or legal operations personnel to implement my recommendations

  • coaching general counsel and chief legal officers on how to embed legal operations into their function

  • designing templates, intranet sites and legal knowledge content

With more demand on in-house legal teams to demonstrate value, work on higher risk matters and support an ever-increasing workload, a structured approach to your delivery of services is essential.

Compliance | Training | Advisory

I have developed and deployed frameworks for legal and regulatory compliance that places a strong focus on spreading the management and monitoring of compliance across all tiers of the organisation.

My methodology focuses on helping legal and compliance teams to build risk-awareness and compliance knowledge tools for operational teams to use day-to-day to ensure they are compliant with legal and regulatory obligations.

I provide ‘train-the-trainer’ training to lawyers or compliance officers so they can on-train their colleagues within the organisation to use to build capability and competency in their areas of compliance.

Tools | Think standards, procedures, checklists, intranet pages and templates. Operational teams need to have a set of tools to enable them to be compliant day-to-day. I teach legal & compliance teams to create these tools.

Train the Trainer Training | Think presentation training, checklist design techniques or workshop frameworks. I teach in-house lawyers & compliance officers how to design and deliver compliance training to their business teams.

Embedding compliance starts from the ground-up. Coaching your operational teams to compliance relies on legal teams, risk managers and business units to work together. Legal & compliance teams need to build essential skills to educate and empower their colleagues to be compliant day-to-day. This is where I can help.