General counsel | L’Oréal Australia and New Zealand
Anna Lozynski
General counsel | L’Oréal Australia and New Zealand
General counsel | L’Oréal Australia and New Zealand
What does being “legally innovative” mean to you? Being legally innovative is a daily attitude and a practice. It means adopting a progressive mindset. It means being focused on the...
In 2012, at 31 years of age, Anna Lozynski was appointed as an executive level greenfield general counsel to establish the legal function for the Australian and New Zealand wholly owned subsidiaries of the L’Oréal Group, the world���s largest beauty company. Lozynski leads an in-house team currently comprised of three lawyers servicing all of the multinational’s Australian and New Zealand operations, including 28 brands in Australia and 19 brands in New Zealand, and has worked very hard to become the leading, sophisticated and forward thinking legal department that it is.
Lozynski’s strong vision and strategy have been critical and have seen her not only build a team but become an agent for change, as well as being consistent, courageous, creative and collaborating with all business stakeholders. Lozynski has pioneered legal innovation by embracing legal technology in the form of automation, digitisation and data analytics, thereby inspiring the global L’Oréal legal community, as well as the legal industry in general. Through automation and contract lifecycle management, L’Oréal’s legal technology tools have allowed Lozynski’s business colleagues to “self-serve” on routine legal tasks, and allow the legal team to focus more on high risk high value matters. It has nine live legal apps, meaning that agreements which used to take four to six hours to finalise, are now taking an average of seven to 42 minutes depending on their complexity. By driving efficiency and being committed to continuous improvement, Lozynski and L’Oréal are delivering legal services in a paperless and modern way, taking pride in not holding business colleagues back from seizing opportunities. As a female leader of a high-performing legal team, Lozynski is proud of her position as a role model for female lawyers. She says, ‘as a young female leader, it is a privilege to be part of a majority female leadership team at L’Oréal Australia and New Zealand. Together with the company, I am very passionate about supporting gender diversity and flexible working – I see it as an important aspect of harvesting my legacy as a business leader and lawyer’. Her work has been recognised in a number of ways, including glowing praise in the wider media as well as from her peers in the industry. A business colleague of Lozynski was particularly impressed with the way she approaches the company’s legal and commercial challenges, stating: ‘Our general counsel is a trusted advisor across strategic business decisions and [a] key partner in risk management, allowing us to move forward faster yet surely’, having developed and nurtured a team that has become ‘another pole of innovation for the company’.
Before joining L’Oréal in 2012, Lozynski worked as a senior legal counsel at General Motors in Australia and China, having previously been an articled clerk and solicitor for Minter Ellison in Melbourne, where she began her legal career in 2004. Her time at the firm also encompassed a secondment at Westpac Banking Group in Sydney between 2005 and 2006.