About

Dan Cootes has over 15 years’ experience advising clients on commercial technology, intellectual property and data privacy issues, and has particular experience in negotiating complex global contracts. He currently acts as head legal counsel and company secretary for BT’s business in Australasia, primarily supporting BT’s global services division. In this role, he also sits on the BT Australasian management team. Cootes joined British Telecom in 2011, after returning to Sydney with his family following several years in London.

During his time in the UK, he worked in both private practice and corporate advisory roles – first, as a senior technology and outsourcing lawyer with CMS Cameron McKenna and later as a commercial and technology adviser to HSBC in its London headquarters. Prior to working in the UK, Cootes worked in Sydney as a senior associate with Corrs Chambers Westgarth. In his team Cootes has implemented new practices and systems to increase the team’s productivity including receiving and triaging all legal requests through an online portal; using offshore LPO resources to manage standard requests; provide templates and advice on a “doing business” portal; using legal contractors to augment the team at peak times and on specialist prices using fixed fees. On these changes, Cootes identifies that, ‘effective change for in-house teams is often incremental in reality. Our team is always thinking about how corporate legal services can be provided in a smarter, quicker way. Not all changes succeed, but the aim is to continuously “chip away” at repeat work so we can spend more time on what is most important to our business strategy’.

Cootes is proud to have positioned legal as a key part of the management team and a sought out voice on commercial challenges, reputational issues and common sense – as well as for sound legal advice. Locally, Cootes is particularly proud of the series of transactions in the past few years that have set up the growth in the firm’s Australian cyber-security businesses – now rapidly growing and servicing a wide range of clients in security professional services and sophisticated cyber-platform development.