Alex Butterworth – GC Powerlist
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Australia: Rising Stars 2019

Alex Butterworth

Senior legal counsel | McDonald’s Australia

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Australia: Rising Stars 2019

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Alex Butterworth

Senior legal counsel | McDonald’s Australia

About

Alex Butterworth serves as senior legal counsel at McDonald’s Australia, the Australian branch of the world’s leading foodservice retailer, working on legal issues around marketing, sponsorship, IT contracts, digital projects, and copyright and trade mark protection. Having joined McDonald’s in 2016 and being promoted to senior legal counsel just one year later, Butterworth is a highly-regarded legal counsel among his peers, described as ‘hardworking, organised, efficient’ and praised for his ability to ‘master the balance of management of legal exposure and necessity to meet desired business outcomes, bringing expertise and agility’. As senior legal counsel, Butterworth has advised on a range of key business matters, including completing the agreement between McDonald’s and Uber Eats to launch the new McDelivery strategy in Australia, a major deal to on-board Q.sic as the preferred background music supplier in McDonald’s restaurants, as well as dealing with Telstra to deploy fibre optic cable to McDonald’s restaurants nationally. Butterworth views the mentoring and coaching he’s provided to Angela Mansour, a junior legal counsel within his team, as the proudest achievement of his in-house career so far, saying: ‘She has progressed at a rapid rate in the company, mostly due to her own amazing attitude, commitment and effort, but also partly with my coaching and support’. Talking about the topics and trends he feels that will have the greatest impact on his career, Butterworth highlights two main areas: demographics and technology. During his time at law school and throughout his legal career, he has seen an increasing number of women and ethnic minorities in the legal industry, which ‘are undeniably making a difference to the culture of the legal profession overall. Broader demographics are encouraging a more merit-based approach, diversity of thinking and opinions, and improved access to legal institutions’, he comments. The changing demographics are occurring alongside major technological changes, according to Butterworth: ‘Contract reviews, due diligence, and discovery are becoming increasingly automated via machine reading and machine learning, and eventually artificial intelligence. Likewise there are more self-service legal agreements and digital signing processes being used in business. Overall these trends are having a positive effect by increasing access to legal documents, support and advice, making them more affordable, and spending less time on large monotonous tasks, and more time on high value advice and strategic planning’. He also addresses the understanding of technology as a key skill that GCs of the future will need in order to successfully advise businesses, stating: ‘This knowledge isn’t just needed to advise clients, but to run a legal practice or in-house team effectively, to understand the real risks in a business strategy or project, and to function in a world where technology is integrated into everyday life’. Commenting on how to convert ‘rising stars’ to in-house legal industry leaders, Butterworth feels the ability to manage the team well and the relationship with senior commercial executives is key for success.

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