Global law firm Ashurst Perkins Coie announces the appointment of Lisa Dobbin and Josh Black as Sydney-based partners in Risk Advisory, the firm's consulting business.
Lisa will lead Risk Advisory's Financial Crime offering, with Josh expanding its data and technology capability. The appointments come as increased regulatory enforcement and anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing (AML/CTF) reforms in Australia and overseas place growing demands on organisations. The new partners bring significant experience advising Australian and international clients across financial services, gaming, insurance and technology.
Risk Advisory continues to see client demand for its combined legal and consulting services. Lisa and Josh are the latest of seven partners to join the Risk Advisory Asia Pacific practice in the past year, including three in Singapore.
Lisa Dobbin
Lisa has more than 24 years of consulting experience in financial crime, particularly AML/CTF, advising some of the largest organisations globally. She has led major engagements in response to regulatory and supervisory action, including civil penalty proceedings and enforceable undertakings.
Her work spans multi-year financial crime transformation programs, independent forensic reviews, strategy and target operating models, risk assessment, program design, remediation programs and financial crime operational efficiency advisory.
As the Risk Advisory Financial Crime lead, she will work closely with the firm's legal teams to support clients in meeting financial crime obligations, responding to regulatory action and developing effective anti-financial crime programs. She spent 16 years at Deloitte, including 12 as a partner, and most recently led its Australia and Asia Pacific Financial Crime practice.
Josh Black
Josh has deep experience in financial crime data, analytics and AI from onboarding and detection through to incident response and enforcement. He focuses on helping banks, payments providers and other financial institutions as they seek to solve data-intensive and technically complex challenges.
He is best known for supporting clients as they work to enhance transaction monitoring coverage and detection models, improve the completeness and accuracy of regulatory reporting, and resolve large-scale KYC and customer data issues, often across datasets that run to billions of records. Josh also joins from Deloitte, where he built and led the Australian Financial Crime Data & AI team, following earlier roles in Singapore advising clients across South East Asia.
Hilary Goodier, Global Chair of Ashurst Perkins Coie's NewLaw & Consulting division, said:
"These appointments mark an important step in expanding the firm's financial crime capability. Lisa brings extensive experience advising on financial crime and has built and grown a substantial regional practice, while Josh brings a strong grasp of how data and AI can be applied to financial crime risk. Working closely with the firm's Financial Regulatory, Disputes and Corporate Transactions lawyers, they will strengthen our ability to support clients on complex financial crime challenges, including cross-border mandates for multinational clients, bringing commercial and technical perspectives alongside trusted legal advice."
Lisa commented:
"Joining Ashurst Perkins Coie Risk Advisory's global platform gives me a strong foundation to continue my work with clients to harden our institutions and the system against financial crime. International reforms to AML/CTF regulation, technological advances and geopolitical uncertainty are driving major transformation needs and regulators remain focused on enforcement to lift standards. Businesses will need to navigate these dynamics carefully to stay aligned with regulatory and societal expectations. I'm excited to build on Risk Advisory's significant momentum with Josh and the wider team."
Josh added:
"Financial crime is increasingly a technology problem, and clients need advisory and data skills working hand in hand. Institutions are under pressure to uplift their monitoring and controls, and I am attracted by Ashurst Perkins Coie's commitment to innovation. I look forward to helping clients in financial services and beyond use data and technology to improve their compliance outcomes."
