About

‘Being a business enabler and making a positive impact within our business and with my team is my aim’, Troy Swan says. ‘I am excited about what we can achieve as a group, and I’ve worked hard to incorporate commercial intelligence, corporate governance and ethics at the centre of our decision-making processes’. Held in high esteem by his peers, Swan is known for his commercial and corporate transactional expertise and strategic mind-set. ‘Troy Swan is a rising star in the corporate counsel ranks for good reason’, said one high profile source. ‘He is a sophisticated thinker, he is measured and commercial, his counsel is highly valued by senior management within his company, and he uses external counsel in an intelligent and efficient manner’. ‘He has clearly earned the respect of, and developed a close rapport with, the senior executive team’, another source said. ‘Creating a culture where we act not only as legal advisers, but also in a commercial capacity as a true trusted business adviser, has been my biggest achievement’, Swan says. Among his biggest recent successes has been obtaining the Australia and New Zealand regulatory approvals for Staples’ $6.3bn acquisition of OfficeMax and OfficeDepot, which, given its scale and complexity, involved significant cross-border competition and commercial issues. ‘Troy Swan is an exceptional general counsel’, says one leading ANZ competition lawyer. ‘He is a smart lawyer with very strong commercial acumen and solid judgment. He knows and relates well to the senior leadership team and has a deep understanding of the commercial and legal interactions’. Swan also played a major role in the corporate restructure of Corporate Express in Australia and New Zealand leading to the launch of the Staples brand locally, following the $1.1bn acquisition of Corporate Express by Staples. ‘As a fast moving and largely online company, one of the greatest challenges was creating an adaptive legal function that supported a rapidly changing company in an online environment’, Swan explains. ‘Changes are continually made to processes, risk assessments and workflows through the use of new technology and digitalisation. This makes the legal function more responsive, easier to access, and allows us to focus on higher value solutions and outcomes to help our business to grow, while also improving corporate governance transparency and practices’.