About

Prior to joining Westpac, Kylie Gray was part of the team at King & Wood Mallesons, specialising in technology and telecommunications law. In the last eight years she has held various leadership roles within the broader legal team in the Westpac Group, including as head of technology and operations, head of the dispute resolution group, head of regulatory investigations and most recently, acting as the general counsel for institutional and regulatory, overseeing a global team of around 115 lawyers and paralegals. At the start of her career, Gray set out to create a dynamic leadership team: ‘I pride myself on developing lawyers to their maximum potential to create a highly engaged culture that is focussed on customers, shareholders and providing high quality legal advice that makes a difference’, says Gray. This meant the implementation of large scale change through four team restructures, which involved the promotion of 11 new leaders and the transition of two leaders into larger scale roles. ‘Something I am very proud of, is that all of these new leaders were internal candidates, and six are women’, adds Gray. ‘More than half of the leaders are completely new to leadership. Having moved across four leadership roles within the Westpac legal team myself including roles which were outside of my general area of expertise, I am a firm believer that changing roles is critical to developing talent and general counsel calibre lawyers’. Gray’s role as of April 2019 will be deputy general counsel – regulatory investigations and dispute resolution. Her role has overall accountability for the litigation team, the regulatory investigations team and the Royal Commission response. She additionally reports and presents to the board on material litigation and regulatory investigations for the group and sits on a number of steering committees across the group and the legal and secretariat leadership team, led by the group executive for the division. Gray’s co-workers describe her as, ‘authentic, genuine, engaged, effective and fair’. In recent testimonials, her mentees and co-workers find her ‘incredibly generous with her time and guidance, sharing valuable insights from her own leadership successes and learnings. [Gray] actively identifies and facilitates opportunities for personal development and relevant leadership experience, and offers honest and helpful feedback, beyond appraisal time’.