Event Report

Alongside our Global GC Elite Founding partners Ashurst, The Legal 500 was honoured to welcome a hand-picked selection of top GCs to Ashurst’s plush Sydney CBD headquarters for a wide-ranging discussion on crisis management, a perennial issue for general counsel which provides unique challenges with every new emergency. The in-house legal attendees, 15 general counsel or other chief legal advisors for ASX-listed companies, included those who had flown in just for this event.  

Joining them were some of Ashurst’s key personalities in Sydney: Lea Constantine, (Global Executive Team Member & Head of Region for Australia, as well as Co-Division Head, Disputes, Investigations & Advisory); Nicholas Mavrakis (Partner & Global Co-Chair Bank Industry and Dispute Resolution); Jo En Low (Partner, Corporate); Kathy Srdanovic (Partner, Employment); Kathy Srdanovic (Partner, Employment); John MacPherson (Partner, Risk Advisory); and Maja Akimovic (Ashurst Leadership Centre, Executive Programme Manager) 

Rounding up the contingent from The Legal 500 side were global editor for the GC Powerlist series Joe Boswell and Ben Lovell, business development manager for Asia-Pacific.  

After the welcome and vote of thanks, Lea Constantine began proceedings with some word association to get the conversation started. In turn, everyone around the table was asked to offer one word they relate to ‘crisis’. The responses were fascinating and broadly fell into three categories: Firstly, the feeling of initial shock when learning the crisis; secondly, the need to stay calm; thirdly, the necessity of effective cooperation.  

Attendees then moved to the main body of the roundtable discussion. The detail of this will be covered in a comprehensive report that will be published in the coming weeks, but needless to say given the calibre of attendees, there were a number of highly informative discussion points and key takeaways. Initially, the issue of communication was tackled – how to liaise with comms teams, the right tone to take with messaging, case studies of when communications have been handled poorly – and a debate ensued between those for which PR is one of the central pillars of a crisis response, and others who felt that spending too much internal resource on comms may lead to a degradation of the response to the actual crisis  

We then moved on to discussing crisis response teams. As well as the correct makeup of these critical units, procedures and practices for declaring a crisis were discussed, with some having multiple grades of escalation along with growing numbers of the company’s C-suite involved for each successive level. The right frequency of practices was also discussed – too often and you risk burning the crisis response team’s endurance out, too few and you reduce effective readiness. In this section, the spectre of cyber attack repeatedly appeared, on the back of several high-profile cyber-attacks in Australia (not to mention further afield) in recent months. Liaising with external counsel was discussed at several points, with Ashurst’s experts on hand to give their take on the crises they have been a part of over the course of their long careers. 

Before closing, the conversation moved to purely macro issues that were at the front of the minds of the GCs in attendance. Environmental concerns ranked highly, as did geopolitical instability and growing tensions between the United States and China. Some also mentioned the unforeseeable effects of the growing capabilities of artificial intelligence. 

The official discussion continued into dinner, with Trent Sebbens (Partner, Employment and Sydney Office Managing Partner) joining the festivities. New connections were made, and old friends and colleagues reunited. As always, thank you to our distinguished guests for attending, and to our Global GC Elite Founding partners for making this milestone event possible.  

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