About

Katie Dillon is a legal counsel at Telstra. Recognised in the industry press as a notable young in-house lawyer, she is a rising star among corporate in-house counsel in Australia. Before joining Telstra, Dillon worked in private practice with King & Wood Mallesons (Perth and Melbourne) for almost four years, primarily as an M&A lawyer across public and private M&A, takeovers, restructuring, regulatory, corporate governance and compliance work, and other transactional work. She has been with Telstra for almost three years, and is currently part of the Telstra Products, Marketing and IP team supporting Telstra’s retail, SMB and enterprise businesses, encompassing product development, product launches, marketing and media and content management work. She has also supported Telstra’s Enterprise legal team in both Melbourne and New York, where she completed a six month secondment. In addition to her legal work, Katie Dillon has made significant contributions through her involvement in the Telstra Legal Innovation Forum, and the key role she played in developing and implementing an e-tool designed to triage legal work, featuring self-help tools, for the US legal team. Her referees say: ‘The telecommunication, technology and legal industries are in rapid change. Telstra values lawyers who are able to operate in a complex, dynamic environment, who provide excellent technical and commercial advice and who exemplify Telstra’s values. Katie Dillon does this, and more. She has done an exceptional job helping Telstra provide brilliant connected experiences to its customers, and has made significant contributions to helping the legal and corporate affairs group meet Telstra’s strategic “T22” ambitions. She is an agile, fast learner who takes on new challenges with enthusiasm and executes with excellence, and consistently shows a strong ability to understand and focus on what matters for our customers. Her legal advice is excellent and is always commercial, identifying risks and mitigation strategies as well as flow-on commercial and operational impacts that have often not been identified by others, which enables rapid decision-making for her clients. During her recent secondment in New York, she also demonstrated her ability to learn quickly in an entirely new complex legal and regulatory framework, adapt to new environments and cultures, and fit seamlessly into, and take a leading role with, new teams. She is a vibrant and collaborative member of the Telstra legal community, and demonstrates she cares about her colleagues, clients and customers.’