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Ahead of the Corporate Counsel Summit 2025, Shanaz Khan, senior legal counsel at Colonial First Estate, explores how legal professionals can navigate compliance in the regulatory environment.
The seventh annual Corporate Counsel Summit will kick off on Thursday, 8 May 2025, at The Star in Sydney for an unrivalled leadership forum designed for Australia’s in-house community. Click here to buy tickets.
At the highly anticipated summit, industry leaders will draw on their decades of experience to discuss common compliance challenges and outline how professionals can employ best practice techniques to safeguard their businesses.
Compliance pitfalls and challenges
Speaking to Lawyer Weekly, Khan explained the “complexity and volume of regulation, multiple regulators, sometimes with overlap or even duplication” is one of the key challenges in the current regulatory climate.
Regulatory bodies such as ASIC and ACCC enhance fair business operations across Australia, benefiting both organisations and consumers. However, having multiple regulatory bodies has the potential to cause overlapping or even redundant regulatory requirements.
A paper in the journal, Regulation & Governance (2023), titled ‘Regulatory overlap: A systematic quantitative literature review’ outlines the problematic nature of potential overlaps.
The paper highlights that if overlap or duplication occurs, it can obscure policy objectives and hinder the development of effective and clear regulation. As a result, this can inflict real costs on an organisation due to repetitive inspections and data collection efforts.
Additionally, the report states that further problems can arise when regulatory bodies issue conflicting rules with inconsistent standards, resulting in legal uncertainty, complicated compliance standards, and inefficiencies.
Given the breadth and complexity of regulatory requirements, it’s crucial that organisations implement strong policies to set the foundation for ongoing compliance. To achieve this, Khan stresses “the need to operationalise compliance across the value chain”.
She explains that this requires organisations to “document the policies, processes and controls necessary to ensure compliance with the full spectrum of regulatory requirements”.
As part of this process, leaders should “communicate and train staff, monitor compliance to make sure the measures are embedded in business operations at all levels,” she said.
Beyond process, Khan believes that another key challenge lies in “misalignment in the compliance culture within pockets of the organisations that contributes to non-compliance”.
When leaders, management and the broader team aren’t aligned on compliance requirements, it can result in redundant processes, undermine the effectiveness of company compliance, and expose the organisation to significant risks.
To mitigate potential challenges, Khan stresses that it’s crucial to have a plan in place for when problems do arise. A key point she hopes attendees will take away from her session is that leaders should prioritise “preparedness for when things go wrong, i.e. non-compliance”.
At the summit, she will deep dive into best practices for protecting businesses from regulatory risks. She told Lawyers Weekly that professionals must first “stop the conduct or non-compliant practice from continuing to occur, assess the impacts, and develop the response”.
Legal processionals should also engage with key stakeholders, with Khan adding that “communication with customers, suppliers, and where necessary the regulators” is key to success.
Emerging trends
Going forward, she predicts regulators will have an increased focus on governance. She said that regulators will assess considerations such as “did the board have comfort that the frameworks and policies were in place to ensure compliance?”
Additionally, regulators will be looking at “what did the board or senior management know about the problem and was action taken?”
“It doesn’t necessarily matter if customers didn’t suffer loss. Regulators are increasingly likely to take enforcement action against the organisation as a deterrence measure,” she said.
To hear Shanaz Khan explore the current regulatory landscape, come along to the Corporate Counsel Summit 2025.
The summit will be held on Thursday, 8 May 2025, at The Star in Sydney. Click here to buy tickets.
To learn more about the event, including the agenda and speakers, click here.
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