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When Jacquie Quinn, Chief Legal Officer at Tennis Australia, first took a 12-month acting General Counsel role at the organization over a decade ago, she had no idea she would eventually oversee a department which is now setting the benchmark for legal ops across the sporting world.
She sat down with InView to share her experience of leading the Tennis Australia legal team through a sustained period of growth and innovation – and explained how they’ve built internal business partnerships, deployed creative planning and adopted new technologies to tackle some of their biggest operational challenges.
“Tennis Australia today is a very different organization to the one I joined,” says Jacquie as she looks back over her tenure. “Over the past ten years, we’ve grown rapidly into one of the leading sports and entertainment brands in the world.”
Reflecting on how she got here, Jacquie notes that her own career journey has been defined by getting a foot in the door. A one-month clerkship led to eight years in private practice; a secondment with a US multinational saw her unexpectedly stepping in for two years as acting general counsel when her predecessor resigned. “It was a baptism of fire,” she recalls, “but it was also a huge opportunity. For me, it confirmed one thing: I wanted to lead an in-house team.”
That clarity led her to the doors of Tennis Australia, initially for another short-term position. Fourteen years later, she hasn’t looked back. “I ended up with two offers on the table at the same time – one at Tennis Australia, and one at a major global corporate,” she says. “I chose Tennis Australia, and I think it’s one of the best jobs in the world.”
As Tennis Australia has cemented its place on the global stage of sporting events, things have changed a lot since Jacquie’s early days. “We’re on a big growth trajectory, which means there’s a lot of legal work, a lot of new ideas, and a lot of energy”, she says. “And that requires a legal team that is really equipped to provide the business with what it needs to grow and succeed.”
What does the day-to-day remit of legal look like for Tennis Australia? As it turns out, it’s exceptionally vast and varied. “Sport is big business,” Jacquie confirms – and tennis, it seems, is a multifaceted operation.
“For major events, like the Australian Open, we literally create temporary mini cities from the ground up,” she explains. It’s a huge logistical effort: on top of the revenue contracts (which cover everything from merchandise, catering and ticketing to global broadcasts and partnerships) there’s also a vast amount of temporary infrastructure to get over the line, from interior design to plumbing and air-conditioning. “There are hundreds of contracts involved in just one event.”
Beyond events, the Tennis Australia legal team supports high-performance athletes, junior development programs and grassroots participation initiatives which extend beyond tennis to up-and-coming racket sports like Padel. Jacquie also advises on venture capital investments and startup initiatives, and acts as company secretary for the organization’s charity arm, the Australian Tennis Foundation.
It comes as no surprise that the sheer volume and diversity of this workload has presented the Tennis Australia legal team with some novel challenges – chief of which are the seasonal spikes that come with tennis being a summer sport.
“During the months leading up to the Australian Open and other summer activities, demand for legal services skyrockets, and managing the volume becomes a significant issue,” Jacquie says. “My challenge is ensuring that legal can deliver the support that the organization needs in a timely manner, whilst also safeguarding my team’s welfare.” As a leader, she’s emphatic about supporting her team to be happy and healthy so they can thrive in their work.
To meet these challenges head-on, Jacquie has reimagined the way that the Tennis Australia legal team operates.
About three years ago, as part of a broader organizational shift in focus towards sustainable productivity, Jacquie asked herself two key questions: “How do we spread the workload more evenly across the year to ease the pressure at crunch time?” And, with the “volume increasing, how can we work smarter, not harder?”
With these questions top of mind, she started making some changes.
One of her biggest breakthroughs came from partnering with fellow executives to bring the organization’s entire budget cycle forward in order to reduce blockers during event season. Some focused conversations between legal and finance had uncovered the fundamental issue: “Departments couldn’t arrange their event contracts until they had budget approval, which used to happen later in the year,” she explains.
Achieving earlier funding approvals gave teams across the business more time to start planning and contracting earlier – creating a huge pressure release valve for legal. “Instead of everyone trying to get all their contracts signed in the last three months of the year, we can now spread the load a little more, flattening the peaks that were previously overwhelming the team,” Jacquie says. “It’s still really busy, but at least now it’s more manageable.”
The team’s concerted effort to move away from reactive ways of working hasn’t stopped there. They’ve also brought forward their annual planning meetings (the groundwork is already well underway for 2026) and have introduced custom real time digital dashboards that allow the legal team to track their progress against OKRs month-by-month against previous years.
So far, they’ve found that the results being surfaced speak for themselves. “Every year, the data we’re tracking shows we’re getting more and more efficient,” Jacquie says. “Data-driven reporting has become an incredibly powerful way to give the legal team visibility over exactly where we’re at – and how far we’ve got to go.”
How has the team achieved such consistent progress year on year? The answer, Jacquie says, lies in one of the bigger changes she’s overseen over the past three years – the introduction of automation for some of their most repetitive tasks. “In 2022, every single one of our contracts was prepared manually,” she says. “Now, over a third of our contracts are automated, and most are signed within 24 hours of finalization. That’s an incredible change which allows the entire business to operate more efficiently.”
Jacquie admits her team’s experience of implementing tech into their workflows hasn’t been without its challenges.
One of the biggest hurdles that had to be overcome was balancing the use of contract automation with the appropriate level of human oversight. Jacquie designed an internal process to ensure that no contracts (including automated contracts) were ever sent out to another party without first being reviewed and approved by a lawyer in the team.
Then came the standard challenges experienced when introducing new tech. “It took more time and persistence than I would have imagined to get to the other side”, she says. “There was a lot of upfront work and coaching needed to get the team through some of the key build phases. But the payoff in the end has been undeniable.”
With such a dramatic reduction in their time spent on repetitive high-volume contracts, the Tennis Australia legal team has been able to unlock capacity. This has allowed them to shift gears and move their focus towards some more strategic work, which, as Jacquie points out, “is exactly where we can offer our real value as lawyers.”
What does this look like in practice? For Jacquie, strategic work can’t be done effectively in isolation from the rest of the business, so her starting point was to send two of her senior lawyers to an intensive workshop on building internal partnerships.
“I can’t overstate the value of actually talking to stakeholders across the business,” she says. “What’s on their minds? What’s coming up in their pipeline? How can the legal team get ahead of those things to support them? These are questions that in-house legal teams often don’t have the headspace to be asking when they are overwhelmed with work. But the insights we’re extracting from those conversations are invaluable.”
In an effort to further expand the thinking of the lawyers in her team, Jacquie has also facilitated risk and opportunity workshops with her senior team members. “These are completely open brainstorming sessions, and everything is on the table,” she says. “We really take a step back and consider the fundamental risks and opportunities facing the sport – the things that you think about late at night but aren’t quite sure how to tackle.”
The insights from these sessions are then prioritized, with individual legal team members focusing on specific initiatives in response to some of the challenges and opportunities identified. Under Jacquie’s leadership, the senior lawyers in the team have also been working on a number of other projects which are directly aligned with the transformational pillar of Tennis Australia’s broader strategy.
Feedback from the business on these new initiatives has been overwhelmingly positive, and the legal team’s proactive work has been acknowledged internally.
Time spent by the legal team training colleagues to self-serve on the initial stages of straightforward contracts has paid off, with colleagues across the business reporting that the changes that have been introduced have made their lives easier.
And, perhaps most gratifyingly, Jacquie has seen colleagues across the business actively leaning into the future possibilities opened up by legal’s new approach. “People within the business are coming to us with ideas for extending our use of automation across other areas of our legal work, which is incredible,” she reports.
For her, it’s a compelling sign that the team is heading in the right direction, and that the business is on board.
There’s always an element of risk involved in being an early adopter of new processes, and Jacquie is the first to acknowledge that her team’s successes owe a lot to the forward-thinking ethos of Tennis Australia as a wider organization.
“We’ve got a global reputation for being first in the market for a lot of things”, she says. “This has shaped the way we think and influenced our successes, but it has also presented our legal team with some key learning opportunities.” The knowledge they have acquired in the process is valuable – and Jacquie has found it unexpectedly rewarding to share what she’s learned with other legal teams outside of Tennis Australia.
“I am finding myself having more and more conversations with other major corporates who are interested in what we’ve done and are keen to learn from it,” she says.
“If I were to have my time again, one thing I would have done is spend more time tapping into the experiences of other in-house legal teams – learning from their encounters with new processes and tech to make sure we didn’t make the same mistakes.
“It’s incredibly gratifying to now be in a position to do that for others.”
