Ria Manguray – GC Powerlist
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Australia: Rising Stars 2019

Ria Manguray

Senior legal counsel | Tourism Austalia

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Australia: Rising Stars 2019

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Ria Manguray

Senior legal counsel | Tourism Austalia

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Ria Manguray has been a legal counsel at Tourism Australia since October 2017, supporting the Australian Government agency responsible for attracting international visitors to Australia, both for leisure and business events. The organisation is active in around 16 key markets with offices around the world. Manguray launched her legal career working as an in-house lawyer of Procter & Gamble, where she was part of a small team overseeing 13 brands across the Australia, New Zealand and Asia Pacific business units. With experience in a broad range of in-house commercial matters, Manguray is a recognised legal counsel in the industry, being a finalist of one Australian legal press in-house award. She has recently worked on the world-class ‘Crocodile Dundee’ campaigns, where she actively led the legal team, advising on complex issues relating to intellectual property, commercial contracts (including celebrity talent contracts), insurance, consumer advertising regulations, risk, privacy and foreign jurisdictions. Apart from the execution of the campaigns, she was also involved in advising the business on various commercial dealings to maximise leveraging the assets with partners and key external stakeholders in government and the tourism and travel sector. As legal counsel of Tourism Australia, the provision of legal services to the organisation directly contributes towards Tourism 2020, which focuses on improving the tourism industry’s performance and competitiveness by pursuing new opportunities for growth and addressing supply-side factors. The Tourism 2020 goal is to achieve more than A$115bn in overnight spend by 2020 (up from A$70bn in 2009). To date, Manguray says, ‘Tourism Australia is on track to meet and potentially even exceed this goal. I take pride in the contributions I’ve made towards this national goal’. She is also proud to be one of the public voices as a culturally and linguistically diverse woman in law. ‘Last year, I had the honour and privilege of participating on a panel at the inaugural Association of Corporate Counsel Women in the House event in Sydney alongside celebrated writer and feminist, Jamila Rizvi, and distinguished women in the legal profession. The discussion topic was on unconscious bias and gender parity in the workplace. I shared with the audience my experience juggling life as a single parent to a young child whilst undertaking my juris doctor studies and working as a paralegal, and thereafter, managing the demands of both home and a career in the legal profession (let alone trying to maintain a social life). As a woman, as a person of colour, as an immigrant, as a working single parent with limited resources, the chances of success were not in my favour. Following the conclusion of the panel discussion, I was approached by audience members who felt my story resonated with them. This experience revealed the positive impact of sharing one’s personal journey to demonstrate how despite the odds it is not impossible to overcome systemic barriers and define your own success,’ she states. In Manguray’s opinion, trends in privacy and data protection will have the greatest impact on her career. She has observed increasing queries on privacy and data protection from stakeholders following legislative reforms such as GDPR. ‘This is no surprise. I also predict fluency in privacy and data protection laws will be a sought-after skillset in the in-house legal profession. After all, we are living in a data-driven world where businesses are increasingly reliant on leveraging data and data analytics to meet strategic goals and grow successfully’, she says.

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