When Treasurer Jim Chalmers announced in February that Sarah Court would become the next chair of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, he described the appointment in a single line: “Ms Court has been an excellent Deputy and she’ll be an outstanding Chair.” Five months into her five-year term, which began on 1 June 2026, corporate Australia is finding out what an ASIC run by a career litigator looks like.

A regulator’s regulator

Court is the first woman to lead ASIC in its 35-year history, but in regulatory circles she has been a familiar figure for almost two decades. Before ASIC, she served three terms as a commissioner of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, from 2008 to 2021, leading its enforcement and investigation work. Before that, she was a senior executive lawyer at the Australian Government Solicitor, running national litigation teams.

She moved to ASIC as deputy chair on 1 June 2021, the same day Joe Longo became chair. The government credits her with substantially strengthening ASIC’s enforcement and investigation capabilities over the following five years. Longo, welcoming her appointment, called her “an exceptional regulator with a strong record in enforcement that demonstrates her integrity and impact.”

For her part, Court promised continuity. She said it would be “business as usual” at ASIC until she took over, and thanked Longo for “helping transform ASIC into a modern, confident, ambitious and bold regulator.”

The cases tell the story

The run of outcomes since mid-2026 shows ASIC’s litigation pipeline delivering:

  • Greenwashing. In August, the NSW Supreme Court ordered Fiducian Investment Management Services to pay $7.3 million over the governance of an ethical investment fund, ASIC’s fourth greenwashing civil penalty. “This case is a reminder that ESG claims must be backed by robust systems, oversight and governance,” Court said.
  • Unfair contract terms. On 31 August, the Federal Court imposed a $3.5 million penalty on online lender CashnGo for unfair terms that let it repeatedly withdraw money from borrowers’ bank accounts. Court said the practice “denied consumers control over their own finances, which is unacceptable conduct.”
  • Cyber security. In October, Fortnum Private Wealth was ordered to pay $1.35 million for inadequate cyber risk management across its advice network. It followed the $2.5 million penalty against FIIG Securities in February, which Court announced as deputy chair. “This outcome reinforces ASIC’s continued focus on licensees getting the fundamentals right,” she said of the Fortnum case.

The common thread is a focus on basic obligations, such as the duty to act efficiently, honestly and fairly, to manage risk and to have reasonable grounds for public claims, combined with a willingness to litigate when they are breached.

Beyond enforcement

Court also inherits a heavy policy agenda. ASIC is now the regulator of Australia’s mandatory climate reporting regime and published its first review of sustainability reports in September. It is the sector regulator for banks under the new Scams Prevention Framework, whose main obligations start on 31 March 2027. Longo’s tenure also put a sharper focus on both public and private markets, and the question of how much scrutiny private credit and unlisted assets deserve now passes to her.

What boards should expect

For directors and general counsel, the message from Court’s first months is consistency rather than change. ASIC under her leadership is likely to keep pursuing cases that set clear standards, whether on cyber resilience, ESG claims or consumer contracts, and to push for penalties large enough to deter.

As she said when announcing the FIIG penalty, “Cyber-attacks and data breaches are escalating in both scale and sophistication, and inadequate controls put clients and companies at real risk.” Licensees that have not yet absorbed that message are likely to hear it again, possibly in court.