About

John Connolly has been working in the fast moving consumer goods sector for over 10 years, and in this time has established himself as one of Australia’s most outstanding in-house legal professionals. He started his in-house career at Lendlease and after five years moved to Woolworths, Goodman Fielder, Symbion Heath and is now with global home appliances leader Electrolux, which he joined in 2015. Connolly has enjoyed the fast paced area of fast moving consumer goods and has a unique set of experiences in the sector having worked in foods, cosmetics, therapeutics and pharmacy products, assisting teams in the development of a constant stream of new products.

He says that, ‘the move to Electrolux in 2015 has drawn on all my learnings from these areas’. Before Connolly joined Electrolux there had been no in-house counsel at the company for eight years, which Connolly identifies was both ‘a blessing and a curse’ and enabled him to ‘develop sensible processes, documentation and find the right people that were aligned to the Electrolux culture’. Connolly looks after all legal matters both in Australia and New Zealand and is required to perform in a very dynamic way, including over a number of issues including approval of all marketing materials, supervision of all litigation and the review of all contracts. Electrolux is a major global powerhouse in the white goods space and operates across the world, and is one of the largest white goods appliance companies in the Australia and New Zealand region. During Connolly’s first three months, Electrolux moved to purchase the Vintec business in Asia and he was nominated as the lead lawyer in that transaction.

The takeover went on for over nine months without support staff or additional lawyers, and the takeover team was required to work seven days a week and regularly into the early hours of the morning. To achieve success in this transaction he needed to rely on his experience and expertise, and having been given the opportunity to immediately prove his worth, in the end worked towards a successful conclusion and achieved a major success on behalf of the company. Connolly also restructured the internal authority regime within the business to greatly lessen the need for external counsel, saving the company a sizable amount with regard to its costs. Additionally, when using external counsel Connolly focuses on the quality of the partnership and is particularly inquisitive with his interactions with external lawyers, frequently asking: ‘Why are we doing this? Where is it getting us?’ During his time at Electrolux, Connolly’s work has seen him operate within many legal areas including asbestos cases, moving the business to connected appliances, and risk strategies in “contract v employee” areas.

He identifies that being the sole in-house counsel at Electrolux ‘really [is] an exciting role [as] there is something different every day’, and adds: ‘There is a really broad variety of work [and] a broad variety of risks that can affect your business and you have to plan, strategise and refine internal processes constantly’. When summing up the company culture and how this informs his view of the general counsel role, Connolly states: ‘There is a culture of respect and fairness at Electrolux which many companies aspire to and never achieve. As lawyer this means regardless of whether I’m dealing with a customer, a retailer, a supplier or a manufacturer a fair and commercial outcome is always one of the underlying aims. Electrolux is about relationship building and the long term, as opposed to short term opportunism’.