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

The HP legal team has recently been involved in a number of significant matters. These range from transactional work including the sale of HP products, services and solutions to large global enterprise customers, government entities and major airline carriers, novel applications to local regulators, and helping shape HP’s new, revolutionary Partner Program. HP lawyers were also active in charitable work with the team collaborating with the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture and other IT partners to introduce HP’s end-to-end education framework and technologies for the classroom of the future.

A significant regulatory matter led by the legal team was the successful application to the Australian and New Zealand Regulators to allow resale price maintenance for products sold via HP Online marketplace stores. This permitted HP to remain in control of product and marketing strategies and, more specifically, the prices of goods sold on these stores despite a third-party distributor being the merchant of record. Such applications are novel and often rejected.

How important is choosing to work with external lawyers who align with your company’s values? Are you likely to reconsider what firms you work with based on this? 

At HP, we aim to be the world’s most sustainable technology company, and we are taking urgent action to combat climate change, protect human rights and accelerate digital equity. Diversity and inclusion, social justice, racial and gender equity are fundamental elements of HP’s Human Rights strategy and key drivers of innovation.

It is critical that HP works with partners, including external lawyers, who align with HP’s values. An example of HP’s commitment to this is HP’s diversity “holdback” mandate for external law firms. Under this mandate, HP can withhold up to 10% of all amounts invoiced by law firms that do not meet or exceed HP’s minimal diverse staffing requirements. A certain percentage of lawyers working on HP matters must be women, racially or ethnically diverse or of LGBTIQA+ or disability status. By late 2020, 95% of HP’s US based outside law firms met this diversity mandate.

In addition to this mandate, all external law firms on HP’s panel must provide information relating to their diversity and inclusion policies, practices and staffing and pro bono programs.

What are some of the main legislative or regulatory changes that have impacted you? 

Regulators across the region are introducing new privacy laws or strengthening their existing provisions. Although global companies, such as HP, may be well placed to comply with these laws given their existing rigorous global privacy policies and procedures, a trend to be aware of is the encroachment into privacy by competition and consumer law authorities. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is particularly active in this area with its Digital Platforms Inquiry and the resultant public enforcement action against Google where Google was ordered to pay $60m in penalties for misleading consumers about location data collection.