About

Trent Czinner started as a paralegal at Blake Dawson Waldron (now Ashurst) in 1993 and qualified in 1995, and after a short stint working in administrative law in London he returned to Sydney in 1998 to take a role as the sole in-house counsel at Hutchison Telecoms Australia. After 13 years working as a senior lawyer for Hutchison Whampoa’s telecoms businesses in Australia and Europe, in August 2011, he took a role as senior lawyer at Salesforce.com, a US based cloud service company supporting Australia and New Zealand.

In December 2013, he was appointed general counsel of Vodafone Hutchison Australia (VHA) and as company secretary in November 2015. He sits on the executive committee of VHA and is responsible for Vodafone’s legal and corporate security functions. During his tenure he has been involved in a number of cases including a judicial review against the Australian Competitional Consumer Commission, a large patent dispute against all three mobile networks where VHA ran the case to the end, and a dispute with one of the company’s network partners. These were all significant pieces of litigation with the last two cases spanning three or more years. Czinner’s team, under his leadership, has worked on many large new deals (from several million to several billion dollars) and renegotiations of existing ones, including; a fibre optic rollout contract, a new contract to virtualise and modernise VHA’s core network, a contract to purchase a new data retention system, the purchase of mobile spectrum, a supply chain financing arrangement and the refinancing of the company’s debt. On his leadership style and perspective, Czinner says that,‘we have focussed on being a team that is aligned on business outcomes.

We have a set of principles we use to ensure we are always looking at the long-term success of the organisation which implies a need for protecting the company’s interests. The company really respects the legal team because we help to drive things to conclusion over and above the expectations of the people we work with’.