John Macpherson

John leads Ashurst Perkins Coie's cyber response team, working with clients to prepare for, and respond to, high-impact cyber incidents. As a strategic advisor to boards and leadership teams in Australia and internationally, he supports them in their recovery from acute crisis. Alongside our risk and legal teams, he has advised on many of the high-profile cyber-attacks across Australia and the United Kingdom.  He regularly helps clients build sustainable resilience frameworks and risk-led approaches to cyber and digital security, leveraging his experience in crisis management and business continuity, stakeholder management and communication, customer remediation and complaints, data governance and privacy, third-party risk management, and regulatory notifications and investigations.

Throughout his 20-year career in international security and crisis management, John has been retained to assist clients to recover from high-impact incidents and critical issues affecting operations and reputation, including ransomware attacks and cyber breaches, commercial and joint venture disputes, CEO misconduct and corporate governance failures, environmental disasters, regulatory enforcement and cross-broader corruption, intellectual property theft and corporate espionage. John has extensive experience in advising clients on the successful implementation of risk, compliance and business operations in challenging, high-risk markets. He has held leadership roles in China and Asia Pacific and brings to his clients significant experience in managing complex reputational, social, geopolitical and regulatory risks throughout Asia. He is also well known for his role as an adviser in managing the risk of unlawful state-actor detention and regulatory interference in opaque nation states.