About

Leading energy giant Orica’s legal team on a day-to-day basis, Malcolm Haack – the company’s group general counsel – has experience working in and managing legal teams across Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Beginning his current role in June 2017, Haack currently leads a diverse team of professionals around the world supporting the ASX 100 company, which is the world’s largest provider of commercial explosives and innovative blasting systems to the mining, quarrying, oil and gas and construction markets, a leading supplier of sodium cyanide for gold extraction, and a specialist provider of ground support services in mining and tunnelling.

With a workforce of 11,500 employees and contractors, servicing customers across more than 100 countries, legal support to the business requires organisation, efficiency and accuracy. In order to fulfil these requirements, Haack explains some of the changes he has implemented to ensure the legal team is performing optimally, stating he has ‘focused on the legal team and how it is interacts with and works with the business with a focus on adding value and building the brand of legal within the business’. He has also seen fit to make changes to the quantity of support, having ‘streamlined the in-house legal team (14% reduction in headcount) and the external legal providers (18% reduction in the number of firms and tracking to a 15% reduction in external legal spend) without negatively impacting the quality of work, and we have developed and implemented standard form documents and processes. I also developed a five year plan for the function, and we are working on several material initiatives in accordance with that plan’.

Haack has also been involved in important transactions and litigations in the recent past, with an ‘ethics and compliance matter spanning multiple jurisdictions, an international arbitration and the integration of several businesses under one operating model’ being prime examples. With a huge number of career successes and highlights, Haack has distilled three principles that have helped mould him as a professional which he states are ‘making yourself redundant, go underground, and experience something different’. With an extensive array of awards, professional memberships, certifications and speaking engagements, Haack supplements his in-house legal role with a number of activities including having presented at a recent industry summit on the topic of “Keeping legal concerns a front-of-mind, company-wide priority”. He is part of many industry associations including the Australian Corporate Counsel GC100 as well as the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) and obtained certification from Harvard Law School via a course in leadership in corporate counsel.