General counsel and company secretary | Network Ten
Stuart Thomas
General counsel and company secretary | Network Ten
Vice president of legal and corporate affairs | Paramount
General Counsel | Network Ten
General counsel | Network Ten
Stuart Thomas was already high profile in Australia’s entertainment industry before he joined Network 10, with former roles including Macquarie Radio Network’s COO and GC and Nine Network’s GC. Since...
Network Ten – the historic Australian commercial television network – has been guided and supported through a number of frequent changes with regards to its ownership and day-to-day business operations by general counsel and company secretary Stuart Thomas. Speaking on these changes, Thomas explains that they helped mould him as an in-house lawyer by shaping ‘a deeper understanding of the role of general counsel in corporate governance and the management of shareholder interests’. Thomas has made sure that his internal legal department is able to keep pace and act decisively in response to challenges it faces, and he has seen fit to implement a ‘comprehensive restructure’ of the internal team into a ‘high performance business function that is both valued and cost-effective’.
Appointing a number of ‘outstanding media lawyers’ to expand internal legal support within the Network Ten business, he has been careful to recruit lawyers who were specialised in different practice areas that are aligned with the functional areas of Network Ten’s business. The result of these endeavours has seen the replacement of external advisory services with in-house capability to ‘provide more commercial, immediate and aligned services to Network Ten’, seeing a reduction in legal spend in doing so. Working on behalf of one of the giants in Australia’s television sector, Thomas has overseen a number of important transactions and litigations in the recent past, most notably in 2017 when he helped manage a successful claim brought by Network Ten against Centriq Insurance to enforce recovery under a production completion guarantee.
In 2017 Thomas also advised Network Ten during the period of its external administration (between June and November 2017) and the consequential acquisition and refinancing of the company by CBS Corporation. This year, he managed Network Ten’s defence of actions and legal proceedings brought by TX Australia against Network Ten relating to an attempted dispossession of Network Ten’s shareholding in TX Australia.
