ASIC enforcer tells lawyers: Don’t take it personally
Australian Securities and Investments Commission deputy chairwoman Sarah Court has warned the nation’s top in-house lawyers not to “take it personally” when their company is facing scrutiny.
Ms Court, the head of enforcement and compliance at ASIC, told the annual General Counsel Summit in Sydney last week said that they should instead accept – and explain to boards – that the regulator “had a job to do”.
She said the regulator was “not the compliance arm of companies” and that even when a problem had been repaired, there was a deterrence imperative.
Sarah Court says the “personality of the general counsel can be pivotal”. Edwina Pickles
Ms Court, who was head of the enforcement committee at the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission before joining ASIC in June 2021, said a general counsel could influence the tone of an investigation.
“What that experience tells me is that the approach, and even the personality, of the general counsel can be pivotal to whether a significant matter is able to be effectively resolved with a regulator, or not,” Ms Court told the audience at the Internation Convention Centre.
“From time to time, I will engage directly with general counsel, and I use that engagement to assess for myself whether that person is someone who might be a conduit from the regulator directly to the business and/or the board in relation to the matter.”
She noted leaders of a business will sometimes feel as though they have been unfairly singled out.
“They may point to others in the market who they say are engaging in the same conduct. They say they have stopped the conduct, they have remediated the consumers, or they have engaged external consultants to conduct an independent review. They query the utility of
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