Team size: 31

What are the most significant cases and transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

ASX’s project to deliver a new equity market clearing and settlement system based on distributed ledger technology is our most important project and has involved a high volume of complex legal and regulatory work over the past three years. This remains a key focus for our function over the coming year as we move towards go-live.

Over the past year, a particular focus has been our review of the equity market outage that ASX experienced in late 2020, and the investigation of that incident by ASIC, our principal regulator. Again, this will remain a focus over the coming year as we implement our program of work in response to that review process. Increased regulatory scrutiny and expectations is a fact of life across financial markets and services and will significantly impact resourcing and prioritisation decisions in our team over the near and medium term.

How do you feel the pandemic has changed the world of work for in-house counsel and the function of the general counsel?

Our team and ASX’s business transitioned very quickly and successfully to remote working in 2020. Challenges have come from the duration of the period of COVID-related restrictions, and the ‘stop-start’ approach to re-opening. There has been discussion about the impact of this environment bringing legal functions closer to business planning and strategy. ASX’s business is so highly regulated and reliant on its licences that our team has always worked very closely with our business and executive team, so we have not noticed a significant change here. But we have seen a much stronger focus on technology adoption to help drive efficiency and effectiveness, and to assist with the collaboration and engagement challenges of remote and hybrid working.

Looking forward, what technological advancements do you feel will impact the role of in-house legal teams in the future the most?

Videoconferencing and collaboration technology has been critical to support remote and hybrid working. For legal teams it also focuses attention on how we continue to work in a way that is client-centred and connected. Both in terms of our practice and career development as lawyers, and how our function demonstrates the value that it adds to the business. Increasingly, we are looking at tools that will help us manage matter allocation and prioritisation and provide us with the data we need to identify areas for focus and improvement, in our new working environment. At the same time, technology teams have several demands on their time and resources, and there will be challenges for legal teams in getting to the top of the priority queue. The availability of quality legal operations applications on enterprise technology platforms may help with these challenges.