About

What are the most important transactions and litigations that you have been involved in during the last two years?

2018 and 2019 have been two of the busiest on record for AMP’s legal and governance team. In addition to the large volumes of BAU work, we have been involved in:

• The Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry;

• The sale of AMP’s life insurance business to Resolution;

• Two separate class actions – one relating to our superannuation funds, and one relating to shareholder disclosures;

• ASIC’s Close and Continuous Monitoring Program.

How do you suggest in-house lawyers build strong relationships with business partners?

Strong relationships with any client, whether they be in-house or external, are not built in a day – they are long term investments. You need to take the time to get to know your client, their business and what the key business drivers are. Once you know this, you can formulate your value proposition and demonstrate to your client how you can help them to deliver their desired outcomes. Also, I always say that a cup of coffee can go a long way to developing a meaningful relationship with a client.

What legal and management trends do you see having an impact in your market?

There are a number of legal and management trends which are impacting our market. On the legal side, across the financial services industry regulatory oversight has increased significantly over the past two years and strong and constructive relationships with our regulators are crucial to the success of our business.

The rise of legal operations as a critical part of an in-house legal function is key. Businesses expect us to be more than legal advisors, they expect us to operate efficiently and make data-driven decisions, and the appointment of legal operations personnel helps us to deliver on this requirement.

In addition, sound management of our external counsel is crucial to the success of our business. We expect our external counsel to really know our business and help us to deliver strategic legal outcomes to our internal clients for a fair price. We encourage them to partner with us and share their expertise in developing areas of law and legal management.

On the management side, AMP is very focussed on ensuring that staff have a good employee experience, and are able to achieve a balance between their work and personal lives. It is not enough anymore for employers to merely provide career opportunities for their staff – we must also assist them to care for their mental and physical wellbeing.

What “legal tech” products do you currently utilise, and do you foresee implementing more of these in the near future?

AMP’s legal and governance team uses a range of legal tech products to assist the delivery of our services. They include DocuSign (eSignatures), Worksite (document management), Diligent (board management), Blueprint (entity management) and L2-G2 (an in-house chatbot). We also partner with our external counsel to use Relativity (eDiscovery) and AI applications, and have recently appointed a legal operations manager to assist with the identification and acquisition of new technologies to enhance the delivery of our services.

Have any new laws, regulations or judicial decisions greatly impacted your company’s business or your legal practice?

The regulatory landscape affecting financial services organisations is dynamic, particularly in the wake of the Royal Commission. Recent laws impacting AMP’s business include BEAR, GDPR, Modern Slavery, Design and Distribution obligations, Cessation of grandfathered commissions, Consumer Data Right (Open Banking) and Sedgwick mortgage reforms. We were also at the forefront of judicial law with the decision by the Supreme Court of NSW in relation to the principles to consider when consolidating competing class actions.

What do you feel are the most effective techniques for getting the most out of external counsel, in terms of how to instruct them?

I believe the most effective technique for getting the most out of external counsel starts with the client. We need to change the way we approach our briefing of the external counsel to derive the maximum value for us – we can’t expect firms to change to suit us. We should constantly challenge our external counsel to think differently in how they approach the provision of services to us. For example, as we set out our brief to the external counsel, we should consider questions like – “could the fees be structured innovatively?”, or “could the external counsel use legal project management to break down components of the work and brief them out to more appropriate price points and skill sets such as alternative legal providers?”, and “could the external counsel think innovatively and use technology to complete a component of the work?”.