Kelly Dickson

While other kids spent their school holidays at the movies, Kelly Dickson was in the public gallery of the Dandenong Magistrates Court, fascinated by how a single decision could reshape a life. More than three decades on, that early curiosity has grown into 20 years at Macpherson Kelley, where Kelly now leads as Principal Lawyer, Commercial, translating legal risk into plain English for the business owners and decision-makers who rely on her.

In automotive, that work spans vendor contracts, advertising sign-off, warranties and privacy compliance, and right now, it means helping dealers and fleet businesses get ahead of new disclosure requirements around automated decision-making, landing in December 2026. In this interview, Kelly breaks down what that actually means in practice, the most common privacy mistakes she sees in the industry, and why "near enough is good enough" might be the best advice she's ever received.

Kelly, most people wouldn't immediately connect law and automotive - so let's start there. How would you describe what you do to someone who has never thought about either as a career?

I’m a commercial lawyer, specialising in “trading” matters.  This means I mostly help businesses with their day-to-day operations, once their corporate structure is in place. In automotive, that can include vendor contracts, customer-facing paperwork, deal finance and add-on products, advertising and promotional collateral, privacy and data use, warranties, and customer complaints. I don’t do courtroom work – mine is about making sure the way a business trades is both compliant and commercially workable.

Your love for law actually started on school holidays, sitting in local courts soaking up the stories. Can you tell us about that - what drew you in, and how did that eventually lead you to where you are today?

It started when I was about 7 years old, when the new Magistrates Court complex was being built here in Dandenong. I was fascinated by how people’s circumstances and choices (and the resulting legal process) could make or break lives. There weren’t any other lawyers in my family, but my mum encouraged my interest, and I never wavered from it. Other kids went to the movies during the school holidays… Mum and I went to court!  

You have been at Macpherson Kelley for over 20 years, working your way up to Principal Lawyer. What has kept you here all this time?

What’s kept me here is pretty simple: 

• Wonderful colleagues: it’s genuinely a joy to come to work… MOST days!

• Interesting work with real-world outputs: my family is sick of hearing me say, “I reviewed that ad!”, or “I wrote this warranty!”

• Longstanding, repeat client relationships: I really enjoy directly advising the business owners and decision-makers who have their skin in the game. Without the bureaucracy, my advice can be quick, commercial and practical. Sometimes, it can even be pretty blunt.

  
  

What does a typical day actually look like for you right now?

A contract review, a quick call to calm a situation down, and lots of translating legal risk into plain English. I might jump from privacy questions to a supplier dispute, a product safety recall, a debt recovery, drafting T&Cs for a promo, or running a training workshop for staff. There’s also usually a visit to the tearoom for a little packet of BBQ Shapes.  

Was there a moment — a case, a client, a crossroads — that changed the direction of your career or the way you think about your work?

Yes. As a younger lawyer, “the law” was perhaps 100% my focus. I’ll admit I sometimes felt a little affronted when clients didn’t take my advice — I was the lawyer, after all!  But working closely with clients really drove home that “the law” is just one factor in a long list of priorities that businesses constantly juggle (e.g. cashflow, staff, stakeholders, reputation, deadlines, etc). Now, I’m much more aware that my job is to ensure clients understand their legal risks and my recommendations, so they can decide based on competing priorities and their commercial risk appetite.  

What do you love most about your job?

I love taking the applicable (and often boring!) legal concepts and turning them into real-life solutions. I really do try to make sure my advice is clear enough and simple enough for clients to act on immediately… always trying to be commercial, and providing legal answers that fit the business.

Our readers are dealers, workshop owners, fleet managers - brilliant at what they do, but not lawyers. Why should they be paying attention to privacy law right now?

Because privacy is part of doing business now, especially in automotive. A few things are intersecting at once: 

1. Auto businesses are collecting far more personal information than ever before, and using it for a wider range of purposes – the auto sector realises and wants to harness the enormous value of data; 

2. Privacy laws are becoming stricter, and being elevated across the world; and 

3. Customers are more aware of their privacy rights, and curious (or critical) about what businesses are doing with their data.  

   
   

Let's demystify 'automated decision-making'. What does it actually mean, and can you give us some examples our readers would recognise from their own businesses?

To paraphrase from ‘Little Britain’, think of it as ‘computer says no’ (or yes). Automated decision-making is where a computer program is used to make, or substantially assist in making a decision that significantly affects the rights or interests of an individual. In automotive, automation is commonly used in lead scoring in a CRM, finance pre-screening and approvals, fraud flagging, differentiated pricing prompts, finance and insurance eligibility, and systems that decide who receives which offer. 

There are new disclosure requirements coming in December 2026. What does a dealership or fleet business actually need to do to comply — and how urgent is it really?

If you’re using automated decision-making, then your Privacy Policy needs to be updated to explicitly say so. Your Privacy Policy needs to be transparent about (a) the types of personal information used, and (b) the kinds of decisions made using fully or partially automated decision-making processes. Practically, this means that auto businesses need to identify where and how they use automation, what personal information is fed into those systems, what decisions those systems make, and the potential impacts on individuals. It’s not ‘panic now’, it’s ‘start now’.  

Marketing is close to home for a lot of our community. What do automotive businesses need to know about how they are using customer data for all of this?

My main guidance is: use customer data the way you said you would, and don’t surprise people with uses they wouldn’t expect. A lot of this relies on reasonableness, business justification, and proportionality. For example, if someone gave you their details as part of a new vehicle purchase, they likely would expect your ongoing contact for vehicle servicing and related offers.  However, they probably wouldn’t expect to be contacted by a third party offering an unrelated service - like a glamour photography shoot (true story!).  

Things like credit approvals, customer profiling, and differentiated pricing - these are common in automotive. Where does automated decision-making come into play, and what needs to actually be disclosed?

These are really on point for the upcoming privacy law changes relating to automated decision making. If a computer system uses personal information to help decide credit outcomes, tailor offers, set pricing, or decide what a customer sees - and that decision can materially affect them - then the business will need to disclose this. Businesses will need to update their Privacy Policies to be explicit and transparent about the “kinds” of personal information used in automated decision-making platforms, and the “kinds” of decisions made. This is whether the decisions are made entirely by automation (with no human intervention), or partially by automation (with a level of human review, recategorisation or rubber stamping).   

A lot of businesses outsource — CRM platforms, finance tools, offshore data providers. If something goes wrong with a third party, is the dealership still on the hook?

There are some very limited legislative carve-outs…. But practically speaking, yes. Whilst businesses can outsource privacy-related business functions and activities, they generally can’t outsource the ultimate liability to the individuals affected by an incident. That’s why it is critically important to do thorough due diligence on your vendors and business partners, to have written contractual protections and indemnities in place from them, and to consider availability of insurance coverage. If you can’t avoid a claim, these steps can help limit your loss.  

Spam laws and privacy laws — how do they interact, and what are the most common mistakes you see automotive businesses making?

Spam and privacy are cousins, not twins. Privacy is about handling personal information fairly and transparently, for purposes related (or directly related to the primary purpose of collection).  In contrast, the spam laws are about protecting people from unsolicited communications. 

Some common mistakes I see in auto businesses include: 

1. Privacy Policies that are non-existent, or out-of-date with current practice; 

2. using really old marketing lists with no proof of consent (and sometimes even no provenance); 

3. assuming a business card equals permission; and 

4. burying the “unsubscribe” or “opt-out” functions in eDMs.

   
   

What are the real consequences of getting this wrong? Give it to us straight — what are we talking about in terms of penalties?

Penalties have increased in recent years. For “serious” and repeated privacy breaches, companies can now be fined the greater of $50 million, three times the benefit received from the contravention, or 30% of adjusted turnover. There are also lower-tier fines for basic breaches like failing to have a compliant Privacy Policy – e.g. $330,000.  

If you could give every automotive business owner one thing to do this week to get ahead of the December 2026 deadline, what would it be?

Do a ‘data stocktake’ (a quick audit) with your team: What personal information do you collect? How and from whom do you collect it? Where do you store it? Who can access it? What do you use it for?  Who do you share it with? Do you send it overseas? How long do you keep it? How do you destroy or delete it? If you can’t answer these, you’ve found your starting line. 

And finally — what would you say to a woman running her own automotive business, trying to navigate all of this without a dedicated legal team behind her?

Privacy compliance is meant to be tailored to the size, nature and complexity of your business.  Don’t be paralysed by trying to have everything in place at once – start with the basics and then build it over time. Find a legal team you can partner with for the long term, and who understands the different phases of your growing business.  

Law at a senior level has historically been male dominated — much like automotive. What has navigating that looked like across your 20-year career, and what has changed?

Law at a senior level was certainly more male-dominated when I started, much like automotive, but navigating that didn’t feel dramatic or confrontational to me. From early in my career, I was fortunate to have smart, strategic and successful female role models who were visible and accessible. I was also well supported by men in senior leadership roles and within my own team. As a result, my focus was less on gender, and more on doing high-quality work, with good people, for good clients.

These days, the legal profession has shed some of its traditional formality and “stuffiness”.  Workplace flexibility is increasingly being seen as compatible with seniority, progression pathways are clearer, and a broader range of personalities, perspectives and leadership styles are recognised as genuine strengths rather than deviations from a norm.

What are some of the assumptions people make about you and your work? Do people really understand what a commercial lawyer does?

People sometimes think of law as a standalone function, separate from business. In reality, legal concepts underpin almost everything a business does: how it deals with competitors, how it contracts with customers, how its products are marketed, sold and labelled, and how risk is managed day-to-day.  

There can also be an assumption that getting lawyers involved will slow things down or complicate decision-making. In fact, a good commercial lawyer is practical and pragmatic – translating legal risk into contextual awareness, instead of just giving the academic answer. 

What are the most important skills — technical and human — that have made you successful in your role?

As mentioned above, the legal answer doesn’t exist in a vacuum. My technical skills are most effective when they’re grounded in a thorough understanding of my clients’ businesses, their products, and their end goal. That broader context allows for my legal advice to support the client’s commercial objectives. On the human side, the skill is in communication – identifying the issues that really matter, explaining risk clearly, and giving actual recommendations.  Making legal concepts understandable to non-legals is what leads to confident, informed decision-making.

Is work-life balance actually achievable, or is it a bit of a myth? How do you manage yours?

Hmm. “Work-life balance” suggests a level of rigidity that I’ve never found sustainable. Life and work rarely sit perfectly even. If I had to pick a term, I’d probably prefer “work-life harmony” – it recognises that priorities are fluid: realistically, sometimes work comes to the fore, whilst other times life needs to take the lead. The challenge is about letting the two coexist without constant guilt.  

What is one thing the industry — whether that is law or automotive — can do right now to make itself genuinely more appealing to women?

Make progression for women visible and genuinely flexible, in a way that supports maintaining a career trajectory through different seasons of life. Macpherson Kelley has been a good example of this for me – I was promoted to Principal Lawyer whilst I was pregnant, and so too were other colleagues when they were pregnant or even on maternity leave. That visibility matters.

Women don’t leave law or automotive because they lack talent or ambition; they leave because constantly pushing through unnecessary friction is frustrating and exhausting. Remove the obstacles, and you keep the talent (and the innumerable other benefits!).

What is the best piece of advice you have ever received, and who gave it to you?

When I was about to juggle senior leadership at Macpherson Kelley and my first child, an older woman said to me, “There will be some days when near enough is good enough”. As a life-long perfectionist with high expectations of others and even higher expectations of myself – that idea was almost offensive at the time. But she was right. The observation wasn’t about lowering standards, but about realistic expectations and giving yourself grace. Some days it is actually fine if the dishes are “near enough” to the sink, or if the answer for the client is “near enough” to perfectly polished.  

And what would you say to a young woman considering a career in law, commercial practice, or the automotive industry?

I don’t subscribe to the old line, “Find something you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life”. It’s called for ‘work’ for a reason! And some days in law and automotive can be really tough. But if you find something that genuinely interests you, challenges you, and gives you fulfilment… then just go for it!