About

Spotlight on Katrina Johnson

Katrina is the group general counsel of WiseTech Global. WiseTech is a leading developer and provider of software solutions to the global logistics execution industry. Its customers include over 18,000 of the world’s logistics companies across 173 countries, including 43 of the top 50 global third-party logistics providers and 24 of the 25 largest global freight forwarders worldwide.

Since joining WiseTech in March 2020, Katrina has worked to build out and scale global, centralised and high-performing legal and corporate governance teams that provide legal, regulatory and corporate governance support to over 80 group entities and more than 40 portfolio companies acquired since 2016. This geographic and corporate span presents unique challenges, as Katrina and her teams are required to work across many different time zones, languages, business models, jurisdictions and both civil and common law frameworks. They need to understand and respond to rapid regulatory developments in both nascent and mature jurisdictions, all at the demanding pace of a high-growth global technology company. Despite their relatively small size and geographic constraints, Katrina and her teams provide full-service support across all areas of legal, regulatory and governance work. This includes international M&A, commercial contracts, corporate law, regulatory advice, product counselling, privacy and data protection, information security and governance, company secretarial work for the full group – the list goes on.

Katrina reports to the Founder and CEO of WiseTech and is a member of the global senior management team. Katrina is also passionate about fostering diversity and inclusion in the workplace and is a global co-executive sponsor of WiseTech’s Diversity & Inclusion programs.

Some recent highlights of Katrina’s work include leading the legal work for WiseTech’s two largest-ever acquisitions announced earlier this year. These were the Envase Technologies group (for $230m) and the Blume Global group (for $414m). These transactions are of particular strategic importance to WiseTech and are intended to accelerate achievement of WiseTech’s vision to be the operating system for global logistics. The announcement of each transaction was well received by the investment community and generated a significant volume of positive international media coverage for WiseTech.

Katrina also led the legal work on the $250m expansion of WiseTech’s debt facility program, WiseTech’s landmark customer deal with UPS, numerous global operational efficiency and corporate integration measures, and served across a litany of advisory and expert roles.

Katrina is a member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD), the Association of Corporate Counsel’s GC100, and the Law Society of New South Wales. She is a charter member of TechGC and a member of the Tech Council of Australia’s regulation subcommittee. In November 2021, Katrina was named General Counsel of the Year at the Australian Corporate Lawyer Awards.