Yvonne Schmaedeke | Co-Founder + Director

Yvonne is a Lawyer and Legal Operations Professional, with extensive experience as an in-house lawyer in multi-national organisations.  

She has held a number of greenfield roles as Head of Legal / General Counsel in global organisations and was responsible for setting up the legal function including team recruitment, project managing legal initiatives and implementing legal tech.

Her experience in employment law/HR matters includes a wide range of issues from new employment contracts, contract variations, bonus structuring, non-competes, performance management, terminations, redundancies and disputes, and has proactively led and launched new suites of HR policies and procedures, new template employment agreements, as well as self-help guides and tools for HR Managers. 

She is an Australian qualified lawyer (with a double degree in Law & Commerce) and has studied her Masters internationally in Europe (including international law and humanitarian studies in the Netherlands). She started her career at a top-tier law firm in Australia, then moved to a top-tier law firm in Germany, before coming back home to Australia to move in-house as legal counsel for a range of businesses – from start-ups to SMEs to large multi-national corporations. 

Her core “why” of becoming a lawyer was driven by the experience her parents had as migrants to Australia who faced challenges accessing the right legal advice when running their small business.  As Head of Legal / General Counsel for various large multi-nationals with significant external legal budgets, she noticed the same issues when responsible for sourcing and engaging external legal advisors and has observed first-hand the impact the right legal advice can have on HR/people matters. 

Her passion for creativity and efficiency led her to think there must be a better way for businesses to access legal services, and with HR/people being core to all businesses, setting up a legal tech start-up focusing on employment law/HR is a natural niche. 

Yvonne is based in Melbourne, Australia (originally from Sydney), and enjoys Melbourne’s good food and good coffee with her family.