Focus on: The role of Time & Place Legal during the pandemic

I like to see the silver lining, so while the pandemic was undoubtedly difficult, and had a significant impact on work practices, it did foster innovation in law, and business generally, which resulted in exploring new ways to deliver advice more efficiently, to automate processes, to communicate more effectively and to bring teams together. This required in-house legal teams to re-think how they work, how they communicate; needing to be more efficient and innovative in both, and to support their junior members through the process, including ensuring the line between work and home life was maintained.

Over the last 12 months, I have been involved in a significant acquisition strategy, with over $4bn of end value now in the pipeline. This strategy has included: (i) advising the business on the acquisition of part of the Alphington Paper Mill site, which involved significant due diligence given the historical nature of the site and agreements with adjoining site owners; (ii) providing complex structuring advice for an NSW office acquisition with JV partners and funding with Goldman Sachs; (iii) leading the legal strategy on the acquisition of an NSW site using the relatively new strata renewal process.

For the Time & Place legal team this has involved considerable risk assessment, mitigation strategies and roadmaps for navigating this unknown area of law. This has resulted in Time & Place being successful in this approach, having reached a 75 percent ownership threshold and commencing the strata renewal proposal. We undertook the due diligence and negotiation and finalisation of transaction documents for the acquisition of a large site in NSW that involves over 11 vendors and close to 17 titles, with options and umbrella agreements whilst advising the business on a $500m build to rent proposal with Corsair Investment

In addition to transactions, I have also advised on a successful corporate restructure and in my role as company secretary, completed a full compliance audit of close to 80-entities, briefed directors on their duties, and established board and governance processes, including the roll out of the Diligent platform.

As the first in-house legal at Time & Place, I established the legal operations, with a focus on driving quality, efficiency, collaboration, and diversity. This included: (i) establishing guidelines for engaging and managing external counsel and driving diversity in the lawyers they work with; (ii) implementing a new legal matter management platform, Xakia; (iii) promoting efficiency and autonomy of the non-legal team by establishing self-help precedents for certain documents and agreements, including user guides for these agreements; (iv) educating the company through legal updates and articles guides and producing a seminar series; (v) establishing risk registers.