About

Hannah McMurtrie, executive manager, legal at IAG started her career as an articled clerk at King & Wood Mallesons. There, after various rotations throughout the firm, she settled in the corporate M&A team, cutting her teeth on a broad range of public and private M&A, equity capital markets, and corporate governance matters for blue chip corporates in both Melbourne and London. Some highlights included playing a key role in AMP’s mergers with AXA APH, Telstra’s sale of Sensis to Platinum Equity, and the Medibank IPO. She left the firm as a senior associate to pursue an in-house role as senior legal advisor at Bupa, where she provided legal support to the finance, treasury, and tax teams and also worked closely with the board and executive team in a company secretarial role. McMurtrie then joined IAG in July 2016, initially as a senior corporate lawyer and has been promoted twice, most recently to her current role in January 2018. She now leads a team of five who provide legal support in the following areas across IAG: data, privacy, innovation, venture fund, information technology, IP, brand, marketing, and outsourcing, procurement and supply chain. Her team supports the customer labs innovation function at IAG, which is tasked with creating future growth opportunities for IAG, including through developing its customer experience strategy, digital innovation, new business incubation, and venturing. Some of the most interesting matters she has worked on recently include establishing the A$75m corporate venture capital fund and a recent venturing investment in startups including Airtasker, Hyper Anna and Upguard. She has also contributed to the establishment of an independent not-for-profit organisation, AI Institute, founded to research the ethics of AI and develop ethical AI-based systems that will provide better outcomes for individuals and society as a whole. McMurtie has made quick progression to her leadership role at IAG, having been promoted twice since commencing at IAG and her team’s remit and members continue to grow. Since starting her current role, she sits on the leadership team and enjoys contributing to the discussions around her team’s talent and strategic direction. When asked what kind of support mentors and general counsel could give to potential rising star in-house lawyers, McMurtie identified providing ‘“air cover” for stretch opportunities’ to allow risks to be taken and to learn from failures. Such stretch opportunities also allow emerging leaders to fill in any gaps in expertise by learning while doing. She adds that, ‘teaching the “business of the business”, in terms of how the business makes money and its key risks and levers, would set up emerging leaders up to contribute beyond a legal capacity in an executive role in the future’.