Building Counsel Media: A Behind-the-Scenes Update

I want to tell you what this actually looks like.

Not the version where I have it figured out and I am standing at the top of a mountain looking serene. The version I am living right now, in real time, in Brisbane, on a Tuesday afternoon, having woken up at 8am with zero apology.

Because I have been building a lot in silence lately and it is time to change that.

In June 2025, I left my role as APAC Head of Legal at a global tech company. I had been a corporate lawyer for fifteen years. I had the title, the salary, the monthly certainty of money arriving in my account on schedule. I also had a podcast approaching 200,000 downloads, a community of lawyers and law students across 27 countries and four platforms and a very clear sense that the business I was building on the side was the thing I was actually supposed to be doing full time.

So I left.

Nine months in, here is what that looks like from the inside.

The good stuff first, because it is genuinely good.

I do not get up before 7am. Most days it is a little later. I spent years treating exhaustion like a personality trait, like suffering through an alarm before sunrise was evidence that I was serious about my career. I was serious about my career. I was also chronically under-slept and performing okayness about it the entire time.

Nine hours of sleep a night is not laziness to me anymore, it is a non-negotiable I fought to earn and I am not minimising it.

I go to the gym at lunch, or early afternoon, or off-peak, or whenever I feel like it. I have no set meetings to schedule around. I have no one to ask permission from. That sounds small but it is absolutely not small. The autonomy of my own time is something I did not fully understand I was missing until I had it back.

The work is interesting. Every day is different. I am building something that genuinely did not exist when I needed it. That matters to me in a way no job title ever quite did.

Now the harder stuff, because that is the point of this.

The income is lumpy. There is no other way to say it. Some months it makes sense. Some months I am planting seeds in every direction and hoping enough of them take root before the watering can runs dry. You try not to mistake silence for failure. You remind yourself that the audience is growing, the downloads are climbing, the digital products are selling and the Law School Tour is moving.

You also have days where the uncertainty sits heavy. You make a choice about whether to let it drive or put it in the back seat.

The harder thing, the thing I did not fully anticipate, is the money mindset work. The internal work of investing in a bigger space, more team, better infrastructure, before the numbers have fully confirmed they are coming. The cart before the horse. The trust that what you are building is worth building before the revenue makes that argument for you.

Nobody tells you about that part. Not in law school. Not in fifteen years of legal practice. Not in any of the conversations about making the leap.

You just have to do the internal work in real time while you are also doing everything else.

What is actually being built.

Right now, Counsel Media includes the Counsel Podcast (six seasons, one new episode every fortnight, 27 countries), the Ungatekept Guide to Legal Careers series (Parts 1 through 4 out, Parts 5 and 6 dropping soon), Career Clarity and Brand Clarity coaching sessions, speaking at law schools and conferences across Australia, and the Career Big Sis Law School Tour, which launched this year with QUT selling out and a waitlist.

It is a lot. Some days that feels like momentum. Some days it feels like too many tabs open.

The clarity I am working toward is which part of this to go deepest on first, and how to stop standing up the entire ecosystem at once and actually go deep.

I am writing these Briefings because I want to show you the inside of this build from day one, not once it is finished and polished and I can frame it as a clean success story.

If you are a lawyer thinking about something different, or a human building something from scratch without a map, I want this to be useful now. Not in retrospect.

I hope it is helpful.

Mel