Conducting an Independent Risk Assessment in Support of a Lobby, Coronial Inquiry, or Litigation

When people hear the phrase risk assessment, they often imagine a spreadsheet, a heat map, or a list of obvious hazards ranked from red to green. In routine operational settings, that may be sufficient. In the context of a lobby effort, a coronial inquiry, or litigation, it is not even close.

In these environments, risk assessment is not an administrative task. It is a discipline of structured reasoning under uncertainty, carried out in full view of sceptical decision-makers who will test not just the conclusions, but the logic that led to them.

An independent risk assessment in this context must do something much harder than “identify risks”. It must make sense of contested facts, incomplete evidence, competing narratives, and second-order consequences, while remaining intellectually honest and methodologically defensible.

This is where a properly applied ISO 31000–aligned approach becomes essential — not as a compliance label, but as a framework for disciplined thinking.

Independence matters more than expertise

The first requirement of a credible risk assessment in these settings is independence.

Lobby groups, litigants, agencies, and even experts all carry incentives, consciously or unconsciously. Advocacy seeks to persuade. Litigation seeks to win. Regulatory processes seek defensibility. None of these incentives are aligned with neutral analysis by default.

An independent risk assessment must therefore be structurally insulated from outcome-seeking. Its role is not to argue a position, but to test it. That distinction is subtle, but decisive. Decision-makers are highly attuned to it, even if they do not always articulate it explicitly.

Where a risk assessment reads like advocacy, its credibility collapses. Where it reads like detached analysis — even when inconvenient — it gains weight.

ISO 31000 is a thinking framework, not a template

ISO 31000 is often misunderstood as a standard that tells you what to write. In reality, its value lies in how it forces you to think.

Applied properly, an ISO 31000–aligned assessment requires explicit treatment of:

• objectives (often poorly defined or contested)

• uncertainty, rather than assumed certainty

• sources of risk, not just outcomes

• controls and assumptions, not just failures

• trade-offs between competing risks, not single-factor optimisation

In lobbying or litigation contexts, this discipline is critical because the most damaging risks are rarely the obvious ones. They sit in the gaps between assumptions, in the interactions between systems, or in the unintended consequences of actions taken for defensible reasons.

Framing the problem is the real work

The most difficult part of an independent risk assessment is not the analysis itself. It is problem framing.

In a coronial inquiry, for example, the nominal question may be “what caused the death?”. The real risk question is often broader: how systems, decisions, and constraints combined over time to make a particular outcome foreseeable, preventable, or inevitable.

In litigation, the apparent issue may be liability. The deeper risk questions concern narrative fragility, evidentiary dependence, reliance on assumptions that may not survive cross-examination, or exposure created by pursuing one argument at the expense of another.

In lobbying, the surface objective may be policy change. The underlying risks include credibility loss, regulatory backlash, misalignment with public sentiment, or the long-term consequences of winning a short-term concession.

An independent risk assessment that does not surface these deeper dimensions is functionally useless, no matter how polished it looks.

Uncertainty must be handled explicitly, not smoothed over

One of the most common failures in high-stakes risk work is the quiet elimination of uncertainty.

Probabilities are asserted without justification. Confidence is implied through language rather than evidence. Unknowns are reframed as assumptions and then forgotten.

In contrast, a serious risk assessment treats uncertainty as a first-class object of analysis. It asks:

• What do we know, and how do we know it?

• What do we not know, and why?

• Which conclusions are sensitive to which assumptions?

• Where does confidence rest on inference rather than data?

This is uncomfortable work, particularly for organisations accustomed to certainty. But in inquiries and litigation, decision-makers are far more sceptical of false precision than they are of candid uncertainty.

Risk treatment is about choices, not fixes

In these contexts, risk treatment is rarely about eliminating risk. It is about choosing which risks to accept, which to mitigate, and which to avoid — in full awareness of the trade-offs involved.

For example:

• Reducing legal exposure may increase reputational risk.

• Pursuing a strong narrative may weaken evidentiary robustness.

• Appearing cooperative in an inquiry may create future precedent risk.

A proper risk assessment does not recommend a single “solution”. It lays out the decision space, making explicit the consequences of different paths.

This is precisely why such assessments are valuable to senior counsel, boards, and policymakers: they clarify choices without pretending those choices are painless.

Why this work is difficult — and why it matters

Conducting an independent risk assessment in support of a lobby, inquiry, or litigation is difficult because it requires holding multiple perspectives at once: legal, organisational, political, human, and systemic.

It requires resisting the pull of advocacy while still engaging with real-world consequences. It requires intellectual discipline under pressure, and a willingness to document uncomfortable conclusions clearly.

When done properly, the result is not an argument, but a map of risk — one that allows decision-makers to act with eyes open rather than relying on intuition, optimism, or momentum.

In environments where decisions will be dissected years later, that difference matters.

Independent risk assessment, properly applied, is not about predicting the future. It is about ensuring that when the future arrives, the reasoning that led there can withstand scrutiny.