Back in the early aughts, marketing and communications professional Luisa Vumbaca had access to databases full of customers’ personal information. What she didn’t have was an understanding of the fledgling privacy laws and practices that governed the management of personal information.
Postgraduate law can lead to more than just a legal career
Without a readily available in-house legal team, she started researching privacy legislation online and applying what she found to her day-to-day work.
“I was developing policy and then running education programs and training to customer services, sales and warehouse teams around their handling of personal information,” she says.
Before long, Luisa became her company’s go-to person for all things legal and compliance. What’s more, she liked the work and could see an obvious synergy between the law and her marketing role.
Enrolling in a postgraduate law degree was the next obvious step.
Part-time programs, a central location and having a JD program for postgraduate students where you could enrol in the evenings was really what I needed.
Getting qualified
“I got to the point where I had all this experience that I wanted to formalise so I could continue to be an asset to the organisation,” says Luisa, who was then head of Marketing and Communications for Envirolab Services, a privately-owned environmental contamination laboratory.
During her search for a law degree she discovered the UTS Juris Doctor. Unlike many of its competitors, the UTS course was designed with working professionals in mind.
“Part-time programs, a central location and having a JD program for postgraduate students where you could enrol in the evenings was really what I needed,” Luisa says.
Find out more about the UTS Juris Doctor
Choosing the right subjects
Beyond equipping students with a fundamental understanding of the law, the course includes a wide range of elective subjects. Students can pick and choose their areas of study, tailoring the degree to their interests.
For Luisa, those interests sat at the intersection of marketing and the law, as well as those that informed her work at Envirolab. Among other subjects, she studied environmental law, advanced contracts, intellectual property law, and misleading and deceptive conduct – important legal disciplines that continue to shape her work today.
Practical legal training
Once she’d finished her coursework, Luisa enrolled in Practical Legal Training, the final step in the journey to admission to practise as a lawyer. From there, she used her law degree to negotiate a new role: Head of Marketing, Communications and Legal Compliance.
“Now my role has become more strategic, where I generate a lot of the marketing and communications work in partnership with the legal side,” she says.
“It’s quite a challenging workload, but it’s a great opportunity to be exposed to in-house legal work across a range of matters, from areas such as environmental law, employment law, anti-slavery obligations, commercial legal matters and occasionally litigation issues.”
From here, Luisa says she wants to keep building her proficiency in all things policy, particularly in environmental matters. Thanks to her knowledge of corporate governance, she’s also been appointed as a non-executive director at Koorana, a provider of child and family support services.
