The GC role looks remarkably different when your clients have stripes.
At first glance, Sandra leads what appears to be a familiar in-house function.
Then someone mentions transferring endangered okapis from Europe as part of an international breeding programme or the legal implications of transporting threatened species across international borders and suddenly "business as usual" starts to sound like artistic licence.
Yet the real story isn't just about wildlife.
Many organisations proudly describe themselves as purpose-driven.
Most would neglect that purpose during a bad month.
Sandra's world feels different because the commercial and social objectives aren't competing ideas. They reinforce each other.
Mandai Wildlife Group is self-funded and has to generate revenue to support its operations, which includes wildlife parks, hospitality and visitor attractions. Financial sustainability isn't optional. It's what makes conservation possible.
That changes the role of legal.
The objective isn't merely reducing legal risk. It's helping an organisation remain sustainable enough to protect species that, in some cases, may have frighteningly few chances left in the wild.
Legal advice suddenly becomes connected to something much larger than the contract sitting on your desk.
From the outside, zoos appear straightforward.
People arrive. Children point enthusiastically. All very normal.
But behind the scenes there's a web of international collaboration.
Global conservation programmes. Scientific research. Biobanking. Breeding strategies. International regulation. Thousands of specialist decisions coordinated across continents. Occasionally even collaborating to design and 3D-print a prosthetic hornbill casque to replace one lost to cancer.
Conservation and animal care is impossible without cooperation.
Sandra speaks about international zoo associations in almost the same way many lawyers describe professional networks. Not as prestigious memberships to display on a website but as practical communities where expertise, research and responsibility are continuously shared.
It's an interesting contrast.
Many industries compete first and collaborate second.
Conservation has concluded that survival is more likely the other way round.
Sandra thinks about AI as a means rather than an end.
She isn't interested in replacing lawyers. She's interested in replacing the work lawyers were never uniquely qualified to perform in the first place.
Admin bottlenecks. Rubber stamping.
Governance processes that require signatures largely because someone designed the workflow fifteen years ago and nobody has questioned it since.
Sandra doesn't think legal departments exist to review contracts. Technology should create space for lawyers to attend the right meetings, ask better questions and contribute strategically rather than disappearing beneath operational workload.
That's a far more ambitious vision than saving a few hours here or there.
Perhaps the most interesting idea wasn't a particular tool at all.
It was Sandra's ambition to develop lawyers who become fluent in both legal reasoning and AI systems. Not lawyers who occasionally use AI but professionals capable of translating between technology and legal judgement.
That feels much closer to where the profession is actually heading.
Sandra's worked across private practice, prosecutions and in-house, which means she's seen enough careers unfold to notice a pattern.
One colleague left to build a successful chocolate cake business. Another became a pet sitter. Others drifted into industries they never imagined when they first walked into law school.
Sandra doesn't present this as failure. Quite the opposite.
Law school oftentimes creates the illusion that legal careers move in straight, predictable lines. In reality, they're conversations people have with themselves over decades. Sometimes the answer changes. Sometimes priorities change.
The same long-term thinking shapes her view of working culture.
She has little patience for treating exhaustion as a status symbol. As she points out, a lawyer proudly announcing they haven't slept for three days shouldn't inspire admiration. If anything, it ought to make clients slightly nervous.
Through her work with Singapore's Lawyers Sustainability Alliance, Sandra has become a vocal advocate for a more sustainable legal profession. That doesn't mean lowering standards or working less.
It means recognising that it's a marathon rather than a sprint and behaving accordingly, whether that's setting realistic expectations around weekend emails or questioning whether every apparent emergency is genuinely urgent.
Longevity, she argues, should be designed into careers rather than discovered accidentally.
Sandra admits she can sometimes go for months without seeing an animal.
Like every General Counsel, it's surprisingly easy to disappear into the machinery of running a large organisation. Then she'll take a walk through the park.
Young children seeing a giant panda for the first time. Families stopping to see Ah Meng, the Sumatran orangutan. Visitors learning about conservation and the research, breeding programmes and scientific work taking place far beyond what they can see.
The visible experience is only possible because of the invisible work.
That's true of zoos and it's also true of legal departments.
Most lawyers don't spend their days thinking about okapis or Tasmanian devils but the underlying question is the same.
What, ultimately, are we trying to protect?