Learning curve never stops for 'AILA's Wonder Woman'

A yen for learning has been a motivating force for Linda Hamilton throughout her insurance law career.

And it’s one reason she has been AILA NSW’s secretary for the past 16 years. “If you stop learning, you’re dead,” she told Resolve. Without continuous education and keeping up to date with changes in litigation and regulation, “you’re of no value, especially as a lawyer”.

AILA’s seminars are a way of continuously up-skilling and, as a bonus, she meets many “really good people” through the association.

After graduating from law school in 1990, during “the recession we had to have”, Linda found there were no jobs. Law graduates were taking whatever they could get, heading overseas, into corporate jobs, even going into politics.

Linda persevered and finally got a job with a firm that threw her in at the deep end—400 insurer files she had to pilot through the local courts, doing everything from case preparation, interviewing witnesses, negotiating settlements and conducting trials to cross-examining witnesses.

It was sink or swim and Linda swum. She credits that experience with launching her insurance law career. It gave her a core knowledge base and the ability to be a generalist. Marine, defamation, professional indemnity, public and products liability, D&O, trade credit, cyber, even kidnap & ransom – Linda’s worked across claims in every class.

Today she is a consultant with Baker & McKenzie, a job she loves because it offers flexibility and challenges. As the firm’s insurance law resource, she can be brought in quickly to help resolve varied issues and rarely has time to conduct extensive background research.

“You just never know what’s going to come through,” she says.

Linda got involved with AILA while working in claims at Royal & Sun Alliance (now Vero). She knew education needed a higher priority among young claims officers and worked with the insurer to offer incentive plans to get the claims team to attend AILA functions.

Joining AILA NSW’s main committee at age 30, she was the youngest member and the only female. She admits to being, at times, frustrated by generational and gender differences. The rest of the committee was predominantly male and very senior.

That’s likely why she’s a great supporter of activities like AILA’s Young Professionals (YPs) and she is “very happy” to see more women in decision-making roles in the industry today. YPs was an AILA initiative that has since been duplicated by other industry bodies.

She appreciates the high calibre of AILA presentations and particularly the judiciary’s willingness to deliver “fabulous papers”.

Since July 2011, Linda has been co-editor of LexisNexis’s Australian Insurance Law Bulletin and that is another learning curve for her.

Still recovering from serious illness, Linda acknowledges the flexibility her Baker & McKenzie role offers.

Linda was a partner with major firms for more than 12 years and, during that time, developed a debilitating spine injury. She was partly paralysed for about 18 months and, when she eventually had neurosurgery to repair the damage she found the pain continued and she had to resign her partnership.

She established a small office and worked on her own.  Doctors then discovered another problem. Linda had a tumour in her throat—a rare form of cancer. More surgery was required, but fortunately the cancer had spread no further than the single tumour.  

You would think Linda has enough on her plate as a consultant, co-editor and AILA NSW secretary. But no, she and her husband, barrister Craig Carter, are renovating an old home in Killara, Sydney—“a labour of love” for the past five years.

They’ve sourced art deco items from across the globe to ensure the home—built in two sections in 1937 and 1946—retains its traditional character.

Meanwhile the family lives in a rental next door that Linda says is way too small for two very active children—son Alec, 11, and daughter Elanor, 9—and a 16-year-old black spaniel, Nemo (named after science fiction author Jules Verne’s fictional character, not the colourful fish).

Linda is confident the move into their restored home is only a few months away and then she plans to learn tennis, given the property includes a now restored tennis court. So learning has been a constant throughout her life.

When she and Craig married, Linda decided not to change her name to avoid people drawing parallels with the actress Lynda Carter – remember the TV series Wonder Woman that ran from 1975 to 1979?

But with the workload she takes on, Resolve’s happy to award Linda the title of AILA NSW’s Wonder Woman.