About

What are the most important transactions and litigations that you have been involved in during the last two years?

EBOS Group’s strategic focus includes investing for growth through M&A and capital projects. The legal team have been heavily involved in delivering the strategy and over the past two years this has included:

• Completing an NZ$175m share placement in May 2019 providing further capacity for growth.

• Executing an agreement with Chemist Warehouse Group for the distribution of pharmaceutical products to more than 450 stores throughout Australia.

• Moving to 100% ownership of the Terry White Group, a leading pharmacy franchise group in Australia.

• Expanding our presence in the Australian medical and surgical supplies wholesale market with the acquisition of Warner & Webster.

• Investing in ASX-listed company MedAdvisor.

• Assisting with the contracts for several new facilities in the Group including warehouses in Sydney, Christchurch and Auckland and a state of the art facility in Brisbane.

• Completing several smaller strategic acquisitions.

How do you suggest in-house lawyers build strong relationships with business partners?

The most important aspect of building a strong relationship with business partners is talking to them about their business, gaining an understanding of where the business is now and where they want to go. Our business partners are passionate about their business and are always keen to talk about what they are up to.

If you understand the business, you will be more effective at your job – so if you are looking at a contract and you understand who the other party is, how the value chain works and what the business wants to achieve you can cover off on the points that really matter and protect the business.

It’s also very important to understand where the business wants to go and what their strategy is. So if something comes across your desk and it links to the business’ strategy – it’s a priority. The business partners will always appreciate that you “get it” and are trying to help them.

What legal and management trends do you see having an impact in your market?

We are listed in Australia and New Zealand and over the past few years there has been a lot of change around governance matters in both countries –there were wholesale changes to the New Zealand listing rules and corporate governance requirements, the introduction of the modern slavery regime in Australia and the upcoming revision to the ASX corporate governance principles and recommendations. There’s been a lot of debate around culture and governance in corporate Australia since the banking Royal Commission and I’m expecting the reporting, disclosures (and maybe regulation outside the non-banking sector) on these matters will only increase. It’s been interesting to debate the pros and cons of the current governance regimes – are they driving the right outcome, what are the expectations of investors and our other stakeholders? All big questions that a lot of corporates are considering.

What “legal tech” products do you currently utilise, and do you foresee implementing more of these in the near future?

We currently use a product via Lawcadia to track our matters. As the size of the team has increased, we’ve had to look at ways to share information across the team and this has helped enormously. It’s also been a really useful source of data and we’ve been able to do some quick, high level analysis of where our work is coming from. We are using that data to decide “what next” for the use of technology in legal. We’ve been tinkering with a few different products with a focus on products that can reduce the “admin burden”, so getting our lawyers to focus on legal work and making it easier to do business with legal. I have no doubt we will be implementing more technology in the next six to 12 months.

Have any new laws, regulations or judicial decisions greatly impacted your company’s business or your legal practice?

Our healthcare business, which makes up the majority of the Group, is heavily regulated and engaged with government. Our Symbion business is a signatory to the CSO deed which governs the arrangements under which it distributes medicines around Australia in return for access to a pool of funding that subsidises the distribution of pharmaceuticals to rural and remote parts of Australia. There was a CSO review recently and some changes to the regime were made. So rather than a big bang of new regulation we see a constant evolution of regulation and government arrangements for the Group in Australia and New Zealand and we need to keep on to of this and anticipate changes.

What do you feel are the most effective techniques for getting the most out of external counsel, in terms of how to instruct them?

Give your external advisers some context as to what you are trying to achieve. It doesn’t need to be as detailed as the conversations you are having in-house but if you can tell them why you are trying to do something they may be able to come up with ideas you haven’t thought of.

Also giving clear instructions – don’t assume that a law firm knows what you want especially if you haven’t had a long relationship with that firm.